the red one - jack london.pdf
TRANSCRIPT
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THE RED ONE
By
JACKLONDON
Author of
The Valley of 'the Moon, Jerry of the Islands,
Michael, Brother of Jerry, etc., etc.
MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
49 RUPERT STREET
LONDON, W.
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Published 1919
Copyright in the United States of America by Jack London.
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8 THE RED ONE
profounds of volume that it seemed in-
tended for ears beyond the narrow con-
fines of the solar system. There was in it,
too, the clamour of protest in that there
were no ears to hear and comprehend its
utterance.
Such the sick man's fancy. Still he
strove to analyse the sound. Sonorous as
thunder was it, mellow as a golden bell,
thin and sweet as a thrummed taut cord of
silver no;
it was none of these, nor a
blend of these. There were no words nor
semblances in his vocabulary and experi-
ence with which to describe the totality
of that sound.
Time passed. Minutes merged into
quarters of hours, and quarters of hours
into half-hours, and still the sound per-
sisted, ever changing from its initial vocal
impulse yet never receiving fresh impulse
fading, dimming, dying as enormously as
it had sprung into being. It became a con-
fusion of troubled mutterings and babblings
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THE RED ONE 9
and colossal whisperings. Slowly it with-
drew, sob by sob, into whatever great
bosom had birthed it, until it whimpered
deadly whispers of wrath and as equally
seductive whispers of delight, striving still
to be heard, to convey some cosmic secret,
some understanding of infinite import and
value. It dwindled to a ghost of sound
that had lost its menace and promise, and
became a thing that pulsed on in the sick
man's consciousness for minutes after it
had ceased. When he could hear it no
longer, Basset t glanced at his watch. An
hour had elapsed ere that archangel's trump
had subsided into tonal nothingness.
Was this, then, Ms dark tower ? Bassett
pondered, remembering his Browning and
gazing at his skeleton-like and fever-wasted
hands. And the fancy made him smile
of Childe Roland bearing a slug-horn to
his lips with an arm as feeble as his was.
Was it months, or years, he asked himself,
since he first heard that mysterious call on
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io THE RED ONE
the beach at Ringmanu ? To save himself
he could not tell. The long sickness had
been most long. In conscious count of
time he knew of months, many of them;
but he had no way of estimating the long
intervals of delirium and stupor. And how
fared Captain Bateman of the blackbirder
Nari ? he wondered;
and had Captain
Bateman 's drunken mate died of delirium
tremens yet ?
From which vain speculations, Bassett
turned idly to review all that had occurred
since that day on the beach of Ringmanu
when he first heard the sound and plunged
into thejungle
after it.
Sagawa hadprotested. He could see him yet, his
queer little monkeyish face eloquent with
fear, his back burdened with specimen
cases, in his hands Bassett 's butterfly net
and naturalist's shot-gun, as he quavered
in Beche-de-mer English :
Me fella too
much fright along bush. Bad fella boy
too much stop'm along bush/'
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THE RED ONE n
Bassett smiled sadly at the recollection.
The little New Hanover boy had been
frightened, but had proved faithful, fol-
lowing him without hesitancy into the bush
in the quest after the source of the wonderful
sound. No fire-hollowed tree-trunk, that,
throbbing war through the jungle depths,
had been Bassett 's conclusion. Erroneous
had been his next conclusion, namely,
that the source or cause could not be more
distant than an hour's, walk and that hewould easily be back by mid-afternoon to
be picked up by the Nan's whale-boat.
That big fella noise no good, all the
same devil-devil/' Sagawa had adjudged.
And Sagawa had been right. Had he not
had his head hacked off within the day ?
Bassett shuddered. Without doubt Sag-
awa had been catenas well by the bad
fella boys too much that stopped along the
bush. He could see him, as he had last
seen him, stripped of the shot-gun and all
the naturalist's gear of his master, lying on
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12 THE RED ONE
the narrow trail where he had been decapi-
tated barely the moment before. Yes,
within a minute the thing had happened.
Within a minute, looking back, Bassett had
seen him trudging patiently along under his
burdens. Then Bassett 's own trouble had
come upon him. He looked at the cruelly
healed stumps of the first and second
fingers of his left hand, then rubbed them
softly into the indentation in the back of
his skull. Quick as had been the flash of the
long handled tomahawk, he had been quick
enough to duck away his head and partially
to deflect the stroke with his up-flung
hand.
Two fingers anda
nasty scalp-wound had been the price he paid for his
life. With one barrel of his ten-gauge
shot-gun he had blown the life out of the
bushman who had so nearly got him;
with the other barrel he had peppered the
bushmen bending over Sagawa, and had
the pleasure of knowing that the major
portion of the charge had gone into the
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THE RED ONE 13
one who leaped awaywith
Sagawa'shead. Everything had occurred in a flash.
Only himself, the slain bushman, and what
remained of Sagawa, were in the narrow,
wild-pig run of a path. From the dark
jungle on either side came no rustle of
movement or sound of life. And he had
suffered distinct and dreadful shock. For
the first time in his life he had killed a
human being, and he knew nausea as he
contemplated the mess of his handiwork.
Then had begun the chase. He retreated
up the pig-run before his hunters, who
were between him and the beach. How
manythere were, he could not guess.
There might have been one, or a hundred,
for aught he saw of them. That some of
them took to the trees and travelled along
through the jungle roof he was certain;
but at the most he never glimpsed morethan an occasional flitting of shadows. No
bow-strings twanged that he could hear;
but 6very little while, whence discharged
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I4 THE RED ONE
he knew not, tiny arrows whispered past
him or struck tree-boles and fluttered to
the ground beside him. They were bone-
tipped and feather shafted, and the
feathers, torn from the breasts of humming-
birds, iridesced like jewels.
Once and now, after the long lapse of
time, he chuckled gleefully at the recol-
lection he had detected a shadow above
him that came to instant rest as he turned
his gaze upward. He could make out
nothing, but, deciding to chance it, had
fired at it a heavy charge of number five
shot. Squalling like an infuriated cat,
the shadow crashed down through tree-
ferns and orchids and thudded upon the
earth at his feet, and, still squalling its
rage and pain, had sunk its human teeth
into the ankle of his stout tramping boot.
He, on the other hand, was not idle, and
with his free foot had done what reduced
the squalling to silence. So inured to
savagery had Bassett since become, that
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THE RED ONE 15
he chuckled_again with the glee of the
recollection.
What a night had followed Small
wonder that he had accumulated such a
virulence and variety of fevers, he thought,
as he recalled thatsleepless night
of
torment, when the throb of his wounds
was as nothing compared with the myriad
stings of the mosquitoes. There had been
no escaping them, and he had not dared
to light a fire. They had literally pumpedhis body full of poison, so that, with the
coming of day, eyes swollen almost shut,
he had stumbled blindly on, not caring
much when his head should be hacked off
and his carcass started on the way of
Sagawa's to the cooking fire. Twenty-
four hours had made a wreck of him of
mind as well as body. He had scarcely
retained his wits at all, so maddened was
he by the tremendous inoculation of poison
he had received. Several times he fired
his shot-gun with effect into the shadows
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i6 THE RED ONE
that dogged _him. Stinging day insects
and gnats added to his torment, while
his bloody wounds attracted hosts of
loathsome flies that clung sluggishly to his
flesh and had to be brushed off and crushed
off.
Once, in that day, he heard again the
wonderful sound, seemingly more distant,
but rising imperiously above the nearer
war-drumsin the bush.
Rightthere was
where he had made his mistake. Thinking
that he had passed beyond it and that,
therefore, it was between him and the
beach of Ringmanu, he had worked back
toward it when in reality he was pene-
trating deeper and deeper into the mysteri-
ous heart of the unexplored island. That
night, crawling in among the twisted roots
of a banyan tree, he had slept from
exhaustion while the mosquitoes had had
their will of him.
Followed days and nights that were
vague as nightmares in his memory. One
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THE RED ONE 17
clear vision he remembered was of suddenly
finding himself in the midst of a bush
village and watching the old men and
children fleeing into the jungle. All had
fled but one. From close at hand and
above him, a whimpering as of some animalin pain and terror had startled him. And
looking up he had seen her agirl, or
young woman rather, suspended by one
arm in the cooking sun. Perhaps for
days she had so hung. Her swollen,
protruding tongue spoke as much. Still
alive, she gazed at him with eyes of terror.
Past help, he decided, as he noted the
swellings of her legs which advertised that
the joints had been crushed and the great
bones broken. He resolved to shoot her,
and there the vision terminated. He could
not remember whether he had or not, any
more than could he remember how hechanced to be in that village, or how he
succeeded in getting away from it.
Many pictures, unrelated, came and went
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i8 THE RED ONE
in Bassett's
mindas he
reviewed that
period of his terrible wanderings. He re-
membered invading another village of a
dozen houses and driving all before him
with his shot-gun save, for one old man,
too feeble to flee, who spat at him and
whined and snarled as he dug open a
ground-oven and from amid the hot stones
dragged forth a roasted pig that steamed
its essence deliciously through its green-
leaf wrappings. It was at this place that
a wantonness of savagery had seized upon
him. Having feasted, ready to depart
with a hind-quarter of the pig in his hand,
he deliberately fired the grass thatch of a
house with his burning glass.
But seared deepest of all in Bassett's
brain, was the dank and noisome jungle.
It actually stank with evil, and it was
always twilight. Rarely did a shaft of
sunlight penetrate its matted roof a hun-
dred feet overhead. And beneath that
roof was an aerial ooze of vegetation, a
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THE RED ONE 19
monstrous, parasitic dripping of decadent
life-forms that rooted in death and lived
on death. And through all this he drifted,
ever pursued by the flitting shadows of
the anthropophagi, themselves ghosts of
evil that dared not face him in battle but
that knew that, soon or late, they wouldfeed on him. Bassett remembered that at
the time, in lucid moments, he had likened
himself to a wounded bull pursued by
plains' coyotes too cowardly to battle
with him for the meat of him, yet certain
of the inevitable end of him when they
would be full gorged. As the bull's horns
and stamping hoofs kept off the coyotes,
so his shot-gun kept off these Solomon
Islanders, these twilight shades of bushmen
of the island of Guadalcanal.
Came the day of the grass lands.
Abruptly, as if cloven by the sword of
Godin the
handof
God,the
jungleter-
minated. The edge of it, perpendicular
and as black as the infamy of it, was a
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THE RED ONE 21
wide savannah, and was like a benediction
to his long-suffering, pain racked spirit.
He remembered how he lay there in the
grass, wet-cheeked but no longer sobbing,
listening to the sound and wondering
that he had been able to hearit
onthe
beach of Ringmanu. Some freak of air
pressures and air currents, he reflected, had
made it possible for the sound to carry
so far. Such conditions might not happen
again in a thousand days or ten thousand
days ;but the one day it had happened
had been the day he landed from the
Nari for several hours' collecting. Especi-
ally had be been in quest of the famed
jungle butterfly, a foot across from wing-
tip to wing-tip, as velvet-dusky of lack
of colour as was the gloom of the roof,
of such lofty arboreal habits that it re-
sortedonly
to thejungle
roof and could be
brought down only by a dose of shot.
It was for this purpose that Sagawa had
carried the ten-gauge shot-gun.
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22 THE RED ONE
Two days and nights he had spent
crawling across that belt of grass land. He
had suffered much, but pursuit had ceased
at the jungle-edge. And he would have
died of thirst had not a heavy thunderstorm
revived him on the second day.
And then had come Balatta. In the
first shade, where the savannah yielded to
the dense mountain jungle, he had col-
lapsed to die. At first she had squealed
with delight at sight of his helplessness,
and was for beating his brain out with a
stout forest branch. Perhaps it was his
veryutter
helplessness
that hadappealed
to her, and perhaps it was her human curi-
osity that made her refrain. At any rate,
she had refrained, for he opened his eyes
again under the impending blow, and
saw her studying him intently. Whatespecially struck her about him were his
blue eyes and white skin. Coolly she
had squatted on her hams, spat on his
arm, and with her finger-tips scrubbed
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THE RED ONE 23
away
the dirt of days and nights of muck
and jungle that sullied the pristine white-
ness of his skin.
And everything about her had struck
him especially, although there was nothing
conventional about her at all. He laughed
weakly at the recollection, for she had been
as innocent of garb as Eve before the fig-
leaf adventure. Squat and lean at the
same time, a symmetrically limbed, string-
muscled as if with lengths of cordage,
dirt-caked from infancy save for casual
showers, she was as unbeautiful a proto-
type of woman as he, with a scientist's
eye, had ever gazed upon. Her breasts
advertised at the one time her maturity
and youth ; and, if by nothing else, her
sex was advertised by the one article of
finery with which she was adorned, namely
a pig's tail,thrust
though a holein her
left ear-lobe. So lately had the tail been
severed, that its raw end still oozed blood
that dried upon her shoulder like so much
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24 THE RED ONE
candle-droppings. And her face A
twisted and wizened complex of apish
features, perforated by upturned, sky-
open, Mongolian nostrils, by a mouth
that sagged from a huge upper-lip and
fadedprecipitately
into aretreating chin,
and by peering querulous eyes that blinked
as blink the eyes of denizens of monkey-
cages.
Not even the water she brought him in
a forest-leaf, and the ancient and half-
putrid chunk of roast pig, could redeem
in the slightest the grotesque hideousness
of her. When he had eaten weakly for
a space, he closed his eyes in order not to see
her, although again and again she poked
them open to peer at the blue of them.
Then had come the sound. Nearer, much
nearer, he knew it to be;
and he knew
equally well, despite the weary way he
had come, that it was still many hours dis-
tant. The effect of it on her had been
startling. She cringed under it, with
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THE RED ONE 25
averted face, moaning and chattering with
fear. But after it had lived its full life
of an hour, he closed his eyes and fell
asleep with Balatta brushing the flies
from him.
When he awoke it was night, and she
was gone. But he was aware of renewed
strength, and, by then too thoroughly
inoculated by the mosquito poison to suffer
further inflammation, he closed his eyes
and slept an unbroken stretch till sun-up.
A little later Balatta had returned, bringing
with her a half-dozen women who, unbeau-
tiful as they were, were patently not so
unbeautiful as she. She evidenced by her
conduct that she considered him her find,
her property, and the pride she took in
showing him off would have been ludicrous
had his situation not been so desperate.
Later, after what had been to him a
terrible journey of miles, when he collapsed
in front of the devil-devil house in the
shadow of the breadfruit tree, she had
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26 THE RED ONE
shown very lively ideas on the matter of
retaining possession of him. Ngurn, whom
Bassett was to know afterward as the
devil-devil doctor, priest, or medicine man
of thevillage,
had wanted his head.
Others of the grinning and chattering
monkey-men, all as stark of clothes and
bestial of appearance as Balatta, had
wanted his body for the roasting oven.
At that time he had not understood their
language, if by language might be digni-
fied the uncouth sounds they made to
represent ideas. But Bassett had thor-
oughly understood the matter of debate,
especially when the men pressed and
prodded and felt of the flesh of him as if
he were so much commodity in a butcher's
stall.
Balatta had been losing the debate
rapidly, when the accident happened. One
of the men, curiously examining Bassett 's
shot-gun, managed to cock and pull a
trigger. The recoil of the butt into the
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THE RED ONE 27
pit of the man's stomach had not been the
most sanguinary result, for the charge
of shot, at a distance of a yard, had blown
the head of one of the debaters into nothing-
ness.
Even Balatta joined the others in flight,
and, ere they returned, his senses already
reeling from the oncoming fever-attack,
Bassett had regained possession of the
gun. Whereupon, although his teeth chat-
tered with the ague and his swimming
eyes could scarcely see, he held on to his
fading consciousness until he could intimi-
date the bushmen with the simple magics
of compass, watch, burning glass, and
matches. At the last, with due emphasis
of solemnity and awfulness, he had killed
a young pig with his shot-gun and promptly
fainted.
Bassett flexed his arm-muscles in quest
of what possible strength might reside in
such weakness, and dragged himself slowly
and totteringly to his feet. He was shock-
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28 THE RED ONE
inglyemaciated
; yet, duringthe various
convalescences of the many months of
his long sickness, he had never regained
quite the same degree of strength as this
time. What he feared was another relapse
such as he had already frequently experi-
enced. Without drugs, without even
quinine, he had managed so far to live
through a combination of the most per-
nicious and most malignant of malarial
and black-water fevers. But could he
continue to endure ? Such was his ever-
lasting query. For, like the genuine
scientist he was, he would not be content
to die until he had solved the secret of
the sound.
Supported by a staff, he staggered the
few steps to the devil-devil house where
death and Ngurn reigned in gloom. Al-
most as infamously dark and evil-stinking
as the jungle was the devil-devil house-
in Bassett's opinion. Yet therein was
usually to be found his favourite crony
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THE RED ONE 29
and gossip, Ngurn, always willing for
a yarn or a discussion, the while he sat
in the ashes of death and in a slow smoke
shrewdly revolved curing human heads
suspended from the rafters. For, through
the months' interval of consciousness of
his long sickness, Bassett had mastered
the psychological simplicities and lingual
difficulties of the language of the tribe of
Ngurn and Balatta and Vngngn the latter
the addle-headed young chief who was
ruled by Ngurn, and who, whispered in-
trigue had it, was the son of Ngurn. Will the Red One speak to-day ?
Bassett asked, by this time so accustomed
to the old man's gruesome occupation
as to take even an interest in the progress
of the smoke-curing.
With the eye of an expert Ngurn examined
theparticular
head he was at workupon.
It will be ten days before I can say
'finish/'
he said. Never has any man
fixed heads like these/'
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30 THE RED ONE
Bassett smiled inwardly at the old fel-
low's reluctance to talk with him of theRed One. It had always been so. Never,
by any chance, had Ngurn or any other
member of the weird tribe divulged the
slightest hint of any physical character-
istic of the Red One. Physical the RedOne must be, to emit the wonderful sound,
and though it was called the Red One,
Bassett could not be sure that red repre-
sented the colour of it. Red enough were
the deeds and powers of it, from what
abstract clues he had gleaned. Not alone,
had Ngurn informed him, was the Red
One more bestial powerful than the neigh-
bour tribal
gods,
ever athirst for the red
blood of living human sacrifices, but the
neighbour gods themselves were sacrificed
and tormented before him. He was the
god of a dozen allied villages similar to
this one, which was the central and com-
manding village of the federation. By
virtue of the Red One many alien villages
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THE RED ONE 31
had been devastated and even wiped out,
the
prisoners
sacrificed to the Red One.
This was true to-day, and it extended
back into old history carried down by word
of mouth through the generations. When
he, Ngurn, had been a young man, the
tribes beyond the grass lands had made a
war raid. In the counter raid, Ngurn
and his fighting folk had made many
prisoners. Of children alone over five
score living had been bled white before
the Red One, and many, many more
men and women.
The Thunderer was another of Ngurn 's
names for the mysterious deity. Also at
times was he called The Loud Shouter,
The God-Voiced, The Bird-Throated, The
One with the Throat Sweet as the Throat
of the Honey-Bird, The Sun Singer, and
The Star-Born.
Why The Star-Born ? In vain Bassett
interrogated Ngurn. According to that
old devil-devil doctor, the Red One had
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32 THE RED ONE
alwaysbeen, just where he was at present,
for ever singing and thundering his will
over men. But Ngurn's father, wrapped
in decaying grass-matting and hanging
even then over their heads among the
smoky rafters of the devil-devil house,
had held otherwise. That departed wise
one had believed that the Red One came
from out of the starry night, else why so
his argument had rui> had the old and
forgotten ones passed his name down as
the Star-Born ? Bassett could not but
recognize something cogent in such argu-
ment. But Ngurn affirmed the long years
of his long life, wherein he had gazed
upon many starry nights, yet never had
he found a star on grass land or in jungle
depth and he had looked for them. True,
he had beheld shooting stars (thisin reply
toBassett
's
contention) ;
but likewise
had he beheld the phosphorescence of fun-
goid growths and rotten meat and fireflies
on dark nights, and the flames of wood-
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THE RED ONE 33
fires and of blazing candle-nuts; yet
what were flame and blaze and glow when
they had flamed and blazed and glowed ?
Answer : memories, memories only, of
things which had ceased to be, like memo-
ries of matings accomplished, of feasts
forgotten, of desires that were the ghosts
of desires, flaring, flaming, burning, yet
unrealized in achievement of easement
and satisfaction. Where was the appe-
tite of yesterday ? the roasted flesh of
the wild pig the hunter's arrow failed to
slay ? the maid, unwed and dead ere the
young man knew her ?
A memory was not a star, was Ngurn's
contention. How could a memory be a
star ? Further, after all his long life he
still observed the starry night-sky un-
altered. Never had he noted the absence
of a single star from its accustomed place.
Besides, stars were fire, and the Red
One was not fire which last involuntary
betrayal told Bassett nothing.
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34 THE RED ONE
Will the Red One speak to-morrow?
he queried.
Ngurn shrugged his shoulders as who
should say. And the day after ? and the day
after that ?
Bassett persisted.
I would like to have the curing of
your head/' Ngurn changed the subject.
It is different from any other head. No
devil-devil has a head like it. Besides,
I would cure it well. I would take
months and months. The moons would
come and the moons would go, and the
smoke would be very slow, and I should
myself gatherthe materials for the
curingsmoke. The skin would not wrinkle.
It would be as smooth as your skin
now/'
He stood up, and from the dim rafters,
grimed with the smoking of countless
heads, where day was no more than a
gloom, took down a matting-wrapped parcel
and began to open it.
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THE RED ONE 35
It is a head like yours, he said,
but
it is poorly cured/'
Bassett had pricked up his ears at the
suggestion that it was a white man's head;
for he had long since come to accept that
these jungle-dwellers, in the midmost centre
of the great island, had never had inter-
course with white men. Certainly he had
found them without the almost universal
beche-de-mer English of the west South
Pacific. Nor had they knowledge of
tobacco, nor of gunpowder. Their few
precious knives, made from lengths of
hoop-iron, and their few and more precious
tomahawks, made from cheap trade
hatchets, he had surmised they had cap-
tured in war from the bushmen of the jungle
beyond the grass lands, and that they, in
turn, had similarly gained them from the
salt-water men who fringed the coral
beaches of the shore and had contact with
the occasional white men. The folk in the out beyond do not know
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36 THE RED ONE
how to cure heads/' old Ngurn explained,
as he drew forth from the filthy matting
and placed in Bassett's hands an indubit-
able white man's head.
Ancient it was beyond question ;white
it was as the blond hair attested. He
could have sworn it once belonged to an
Englishman, and to an Englishman of
long before by token of the heavy gold
circlets still threaded in the withered ear-
lobes.
Now your head ... the devil-devil
doctor began on his favourite topic.
111 tell you what/' Bassett interrupted,
struck by a new idea.
When I die 111
let you have my head to cure, if, first, you
take me to look upon the Red One/'
I will have your head anyway when
you are dead, Ngurn rejected the pro-
position. He added, with the brutal frank-
ness of the savage :
Besides, you have
not long to live. You are almost a dead
man now. You will grow less strong. In
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THE RED ONE 37
not many months I shall have you here
turning and turning in the smoke. It is
pleasant, through the long afternoons, to
turn the head of one you have known as
well as I know you. And I shall talk to
you and tell you the many secrets youwant to know. Which will not matter,
for you will be dead/'
Ngurn, Bassett threatened in sudden
anger. You know the Baby Thunder
in the Iron that is mine/' (This was in
reference to his all-potent and all-
awful shotgun.)
I can kill you any
time, and then you will not get myhead.
Just the same, will Vngngn, or some
one else of my folk get it, Ngurn com-
placently assured him. And just the
same will it turn and turn here in the
devil-devil house in the smoke.The
quicker you slay me with your Baby
Thunder, the quicker will your head turn
in the smoke/'
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38 THE RED ONE
And Bassett knew he was beaten in the
discussion.
What was the Red One ? Bassett asked
himself a thousand times in the succeeding
week, while he seemed to grow stronger.
What was the source of the wonderful
sound ? What was this Sun Singer, this
Star-Born One, this mysterious deity, as
bestial-conducted as the black and kinky-
headed and monkey-like human beasts
who worshipped it, and whose silver-sweet,
bull-mouthed singing and commanding he
had heard at the taboo distance for so
long ?
Ngurn had he failed to bribe with the
inevitable curing of his head when he was
dead. Vngngn, imbecile and chief that
he was, was too imbecilic, too much under
the sway of Ngurn, to be considered.
Remained Balatta, who, from the time shefound him and poked his blue eyes open
to recrudescence of her grotesque female
hideousness, had continued his adorer.
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THE RED ONE 39
Woman she was, and he had long known
that the only way to win from her treason
of her tribe was through the woman's
heart of her.
Bassett was a fastidious man. He had
never recovered from the initial horror
caused by Balatta's female awfulness.
Back in England, even at best, the charm
of woman, to him, had never been robust.
Yet now, resolutely, as only a man can
do who is capable of martyring himself
for the cause of science, he proceeded to
violate all the fineness and delicacy of
his nature by making love to the unthink-
ably disgusting bushwoman.
He shuddered, but with averted face hid
his grimaces and swallowed his gorge as he
put his arm around her dirt-crusted shoul-
ders and felt the contact of her rancid-
oily and kinky hair with his neck and chin.
But he nearly screamed when she suc-
cumbed to that caress so at the very first
of the courtship and mowed and gibbered
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40 THE RED ONE
and squealed little, queer, pig-like gurgly
noises of delight. It was too much. And
the next he did in the singular courtship
was to take her down to the stream and
give her a vigorous scrubbing.
From then on he devoted himself toher
like a true swain as frequently and for as
long at a time as his will could override
his repugnance. But marriage, which she
ardently suggested, with due observance of
tribal custom, he balked at. Fortunately,
taboo rule was strong in the tribe. Thus,
Ngurn could never touch bone, or flesh,
or hide of crocodile. This had been or-
dained at his birth. Vngngn was denied
ever the touch of woman. Such pollution,
did it chance to occur, could be purged
only by the death of the offending female.
It had happened once, since Bassett's
arrival, when agirl
of nine,running
in
play, stumbled and fell against the sacred
chief. And the girl-child was seen no
more. In whispers, Balatta told Bassett
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THE RED ONE 41
that she had been three days and nights
in dying before the Red One. As for
Balatta, the breadfruit was taboo to her.
For which Bassett was thankful. The
taboo might have been water.
For himself, he fabricated aspecial
taboo. Only could he marry, he explained,
when the Southern Cross rode highest in
the sky. Knowing his astronomy, he
thus gained a reprieve of nearly nine
months ; and he was confident that
within that time he would either be
dead or escaped to the coast with full
knowledge of the Red One and of the source
of the Red One's wonderful voice. At
first he had fancied the Red One to be
some colossal statue, like Memnon, ren-
dered vocal under certain temperature
conditions of sunlight. But when, after
a war raid, a batch of prisoners was brought
in and the sacrifice made at night, in the
midst of rain, when the sun could play
nopart,
the Red One had been more vocal
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42 THE RED ONE
than usual, Bassett discarded that
hypo-thesis.
In company with Balatta, sometimes
with men and parties of women, the
freedom of the jungle was his for three
quadrants of the compass. But the fourth
quadrant, which contained the Red One's
abiding place, was taboo. He made more
thorough love to Balatta also saw to
it that she scrubbed herself more frequently.
Eternal female she was, capable of any
treason for the sake of love. And, though
the sight of her was provocative of nausea
and the contact of her provocative of des-
pair, although he could not escape her
awfulness in his dream-haunted nightmares
of her, he nevertheless was aware of the
cosmic verity of sex that animated her and
that made her own life of less value than
the happinessof her lover
with whomshe hoped to mate. Juliet or Balatta ?
Where was the intrinsic difference t The
soft and tender product of ultra-civiliza-
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THE RED ONE 43
tion, or her bestial prototype of a hundred
thousand years before her ? there was
no difference.
Bassett was a scientist first, a humanist
afterward. In the jungle-heart of Guadal-
canal heput
the affair to the test, as in
the laboratory he would have put to the
test any chemical reaction. He increased
his feigned ardour for the bushwoman, at
the same time increasing the imperiousness
of his will of desire over her to be led to
look upon the Red One face to face. It
was the old story, he recognized, that the
woman must pay, and it occurred when the
two of them, one day, were catching the
unclassified and unnamed little black fish,
an inch long, half-eel and half-scaled,
rotund with salmon-golden roe, that fre-
quented the fresh water, and that were
esteemed, raw and whole, fresh or putrid,
a perfect delicacy. Prone in the muck
of the decaying jungle-floor, Balatta threw
herself, clutching his ankles with her hands
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44 THE RED ONE
kissinghis feet and
making slubberynoises
that chilled his backbone up and down
again. She begged him to kill her rather
than exact this ultimate love-payment.
She told him of the penalty of breaking
the taboo of the Red One a week of
torture, living, the details of which she
yammered out from her face in the mire
until he realized that he was yet a tyro in
knowledge of the frightfulness the human
was capable of wreaking on the human.
Yet did Bassett insist on having his
man's will satisfied, at the woman's risk,
that he might solve the mystery of the
Red One's singing, though she should die
long and horribly and screaming. And
Balatta, being mere woman, yielded. She
led him into the forbidden quadrant. An
abrupt mountain, shouldering in from the
north to meet a similar intrusion from the
south, tormented the stream in which
they had fished into a deep and gloomy
gorge. After a mile along the gorge, the
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THE RED ONE 45
way plunged sharply upward until they
crossed a saddle of raw limestone which
attracted his geologist's eye. Still climbing,
although he paused often from sheer physi-
cal weakness, they scaled forest-clad heights
until they emerged on a naked mesa or
tableland. Bassett recognized the stuff
of its composition as black volcanic sand,
and knew that a pocket magnet could have
captured a full load of the sharply angular
grains he trod upon.
And then holding Balatta by the hand
and leading her onward, he came to itt
a tremendous pit, obviously artificial, in
the heart of the plateau. Old history, the
South Seas Sailing Directions, scores of
remembered data and connotations swift
and furious, surged through his brain.
It was Mendana who had discovered the
islandsand named them Solomon's,
be-
lieving that he had found that monarch's
fabled mines. They had laughed at the
old navigator's child-like credulity ;and
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46 THE RED ONE
yet here stood himself, Bassett, on the
rim of an excavation for all the world like
the diamond pits of South Africa.
But no diamond this that he gazed down
upon. Rather was it a pearl, with the
depth of iridescence of a pearl ;but of
a size all pearls of earth and time, welded
into one, could not have totalled;
and
of a colour undreamed of in any pearl,
or of
anythingelse, for that matter, for
it was the colour of the Red One. And
the Red One himself Bassett knew it to
be on the instant. A perfect sphere,
full two hundred feet in diameter, the top
of it was a hundred feet below the level
of the rim. He likened the colour quality
of it to lacquer. Indeed, he took it to be
some sort of lacquer, applied by man, but
a lacquer too marvellously clever to have
been manufactured by the bush-folk.
Brighter than bright cherry-red, its rich-
ness of colour was as if it were red builded
upon red. It glowed and iridesced in
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THE RED ONE 47
the sunlight as if gleaming up from underlay
under underlay of red.
In vain Balatta strove to dissuade him
from descending. She threw herself in
the dirt; but, when he continued down
the trail that spiralled the pit-wall, she
followed, cringing and whimpering her
terror. That the red sphere had been dug
out as a precious thing, was patent. Con-
sidering the paucity of members of the
federated twelve villages and their primitive
tools and methods, Bassett knew that the
toil of a myriad generations could scarcely
have made that enormous excavation.
He found the pit bottom carpeted with
human bones, among which, battered and
defaced, lay village gods of wood and
stone. Some, covered with obscene totemic
figures and designs, were carved from
solid tree trunksforty
orfifty
feet inlength.
He noted the absence of the shark and
turtle gods, so common among the shore
villages, and was amazed at the constant
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48 THE RED ONE
recurrence of the helmet motive. Whatdid these jungle savages of the dark heart
of Guadalcanal know of helmets ? Had
Mendana's men-at-arms worn helmets and
penetrated here centuries before ? And
if not, then whence had the bush-folk
caught the motive ?
Advancing over the litter of gods and
bones, Balatta whimpering at his heels,
Bassett entered the shadow of the Red
One and passed on under its gigantic
overhang until he touched it with his
finger-tips. No lacquer that. Nor was
the surface smooth as it should have been
in the case of
lacquer.On the
contrary,it was corrugated and pitted, with here
and there patches that showed signs of
heat and fusing. Also, the substance of
it was metal, though unlike any metal,
or combination of metals, he had ever
known. As for the colour itself, he
decided it to be no application. It was
the intrinsic colour of the metal itself.
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THE RED ONE 49
He moved Msfinger-tips,
whichup
to
that had merely rested, along the surface,
and felt the whole gigantic sphere quicken
and live and respond. It was incredible
So light a touch on so vast a mass Yet
did it quiver under the finger-tip caress
in rhythmic vibrations that became whis-
perings and rustlings and mutterings of
sound but of sound so different;
so
elusively thin that it was shimmeringly
sibilant;
so mellow that it was mad-
dening sweet, piping like an elfin horn,
which last was just what Bassett decided
would be like a peal from some bell of the
gods reaching earthward from across space.
He looked at Balatta with swift question-
ing ;but the voice of the Red One he had
evoked had flung her face downward and
moaning among the bones. He returned
to contemplation of the prodigy. Hollowit was, and of no metal known on earth,
was his conclusion. It was right-named
by the ones of old-time as the Star-Born.
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5o THE RED ONE
Only from the stars could it have come,and no thing of chance was it. It was a
creation of artifice and mind. Such per-
fection of form, such hollowness that it
certainly possessed, could not be the result
of mere fortuitousness. A child of intelli-
gences, remote and unguessable, working
corporally in metals, it indubitably was.
He stared at it in amaze, his brain a racing
wild-fire of hypotheses to account for this
far-journeyer who had adventured the
night of space, threaded the stars, and now
rose before him and above him, exhumed
by patient anthropophagi, pitted and
lacquered byits
fierybath in two
atmospheres.
But was the colour a lacquer of heat
upon some familiar metal ? Or was it an
intrinsic quality of the metal itself ? He
thrust in the blue-point of his pocket-
knife to test the constitution of the stuff.
Instantly the entire sphere burst into a
mighty whispering, sharp with protest,
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THE RED ONE 51
almost twanging goldenly,if a
whispercould possibly be considered to twang,
rising higher, sinking deeper, the two ex-
tremes of the registry of sound threat-
ening to complete the circle and coalesce
into the bull-mouthed thundering he had
so often heard beyond the taboo distance.
Forgetful of safety, of his own life itself,
entranced by the wonder of the unthinkable
and unguessable thing, he raised his knife
to strike heavily from a long stroke, but
was prevented by Balatta. She upreared
on her own knees in an agony of terror,
clasping his knees and supplicating him
to desist. In theintensity
of her desire
to impress him, she put her forearm between
her teeth and sank them to the bone.
He scarcely observed her act, although
he yielded automatically to his gentler
instincts and withheld the knife-hack. Tohim, human life had dwarfed to microscopic
proportions before this colossal portent of
higher life from within the distances of
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52 THE RED ONE
the sidereal universe. As had she been a
dog, he kicked the ugly little bushwoman
to her feet and compelled her to start
with him on an encirclement of the base.
Part way around, he encountered horrors.
Even, among the others, did he recognize
the sun-shrivelled remnant of the nine-
years girl who had accidentally broken
Chief Vngngn's personality taboo. And,
among what was left of these that had
passed, he encountered what was left
of one who had not yet passed. Truly
had the bush-folk named themselves into
the name of the Red One, seeing in him
their own image which they strove to
placate and please with such red offerings.
Farther around, always treading the
bones and images of humans and gods
that constituted the floor of this ancient
charnel-house of sacrifice, he came upon
the device by which the Red One was made
to send his call singing thunderingly across
the jungle-belts and grass-lands to the
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THE RED ONE 53
far beach of Ringmanu. Simple and
primitive was it as was the Red One's
consummate artifice. A great king-post,
half a hundred feet in length, seasoned by
centuries of superstitious care, carven into
dynasties of gods, each superimposed, eachhelmeted, each seated in the open mouth
of a crocodile, was slung by ropes, twisted
of climbing vegetable parasites, from the
apex of a tripod of three great forest
trunks, themselves carved into grinning
and grotesque adumbrations of man's
modern concepts of art and god. From
the striker king-post, were suspended ropes
of climbers to which men could apply
their strength and direction. Like a bat-
tering ram, this king-post could be driven
end-onward against the mighty red-iri-
descent sphere.
Here was whereNgurn
officiated and
functioned religiously for himself and the
twelve tribes under him. Bassett laughed
aloud, almost with madness, at the thought
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54 THE RED ONE
of this wonderfulmessenger, winged
with
intelligence across space, to fall into a
bushman stronghold and be worshipped
by ape-like, man-eating and head-hunting
savages. It was as if God's World had
fallen into the muck mire of the abyss
underlying the bottom of hell;
as if
Jehovah's Commandments had been pre-
sented on carved stone to the monkeys
of the monkey cage at the Zoo;
as if the
Sermon on the Mount had been preached
in a roaring bedlam of lunatics.
The slow weeks passed. The nights,
byelection, Bassett spent on the ashen
floor of the devil-devil house, beneath
the ever-swinging, slow-curing heads. His
reason for this was that it was taboo to
the lesser sex of woman, and therefore, a
refuge for him from Balatta, who grewmore persecutingly and perilously loverly
as the Southern Cross rode higher in the
sky and marked the imminence of her
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THE RED ONE 55
nuptials. His days Bassett spent in a
hammock swung under the shade of the
great breadfruit tree before the devil-
devil house. There were breaks in this
programme, when, in the comas of his
devastating fever-attacks,he
layfor
daysand nights in the house of heads. Ever
he struggled to combat the fever, to live,
to continue to live, to grow strong and
stronger against the day when he would
be strong enough to dare the grass-lands
and the belted jungle beyond, and win to
the beach, and to some labour-recruiting,
black-birding ketch or schooner, and on to
civilization and the men of civilization,
to whom he could give news of the
message from other worlds that lay, darkly
worshipped by beastmen, in the black heart
of Guadalcanal's midmost centre.
On the othernights, lying
late under
the breadfruit tree, Bassett spent long
hours watching the slow setting of the
western stars beyond the black wall of
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56 THE RED ONE
jungle
where it had been thrust back
bythe clearing for the village. Possessed of
more than a cursory knowledge of astro-
nomy, he took a sick man's pleasure in
speculating as to the dwellers on the unseen
worlds of those incredibly remote suns, to
haunt whose houses of light, life came forth,
a shy visitant, from the rayless crypts of
matter. He could no more apprehend
limits to time than bounds to space. No
subversive radium speculations had shaken
his steady scientific faith in the conser-
vation of energy and the indestructibility
of matter. Always and forever must there
have been stars. And surely, in that
cosmic ferment, all must be comparatively
alike, comparatively of the same substance,
or substances, save for the freaks of the
ferment. All must obey, or compose, the
same laws that ran without infraction
through the entire experience of man.
Therefore, he argued and agreed, must
worlds and life be appanages to all the suns
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THE RED ONE 57
as they were appanages to the particular
sun of his own solar system.
Even as he lay here, under the breadfruit
tree, an intelligence that stared across the
starry gulfs, so must all the universe be
exposedto the ceaseless
scrutiny
of innumer-
able eyes, like his, though grantedly differ-
ent, with behind them, by the same token,
intelligences that questioned and sought
the meaning and the construction of the
whole. So reasoning, he felt his soul go
forth in kinship with that august company,
that multitude whose gaze was forever
upon the arras of infinity.
Who were they, what were they, those
far distant and superior ones who had
bridged the sky with their gigantic, red-
iridescent, heaven-singing message ? Surely,
and long since, had they, too, trod the path
on which man had so recently, by the
calendar of the cosmos, set his feet. And
to be able to send a message across the
pit of space, surely they had reached those
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58 THE RED ONE
heights to which man, in tears and travail
and bloody sweat, in darkness and con-
fusion of many counsels, was so slowly
struggling. And what were they on their
heights ? Had they won Brotherhood ?
Or had they learned that the law of love
imposed the penalty of weakness and decay ?
Was strife, life ? Was the rule of all the
universe the pitiless rule of natural selec-
tion ? And, and most immediately and
poignantly, were their far conclusions, their
long-won wisdoms, shut even then in the
huge, metallic heart of the Red One,
waiting for the first earth-man to read ?
Of one thing he was certain:
No drop of
red dew shaken from the lion-mane of
some sun in torment, was the sounding
sphere. It was of design, not chance, and
it contained the speech and wisdom of the
stars.
What engines and elements and mastered
forces, what lore and mysteries and destiny-
controls, might be there Undoubtedly,
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THE RED ONE 59
since so much could be enclosed in so little
a thing as the foundation stone of a public
building, this enormous sphere should con-
tain vast histories, profounds of research
achieved beyond man's wildest guesses,
laws and formulae that, easily mastered,would make man's life on earth, individual
and collective, spring up from its present
mire to inconceivable heights of purity
and power. It was Time's greatest gift to
blindfold, insatiable, and sky-aspiring man.
And to him, Bassett, had been vouchsafed
the lordly fortune to be the first to receive
this message from man's interstellar kin
No white man, much less no outland
man of the other bush-tribes, had gazed
upon the Red One and lived. Such the
law expounded by Ngurn to Bassett . Ther e
was such a thing as blood brotherhood.
Bassett,in
return, hadoften
arguedin
the
past. But Ngurn had stated solemnly no.
Even the blood brotherhood was outside the
favour of the Red One. Only a man born
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60 THE RED ONE
within thetribe could look upon the Red
One and live. But now, his guilty secret
known only to Balatta, whose fear of
immolation before the Red One fast-sealed
her lips, the situation was different. What
he had to do was to recover from the
abominable fevers that weakened him, and
gain to civilization. Then would he lead
an expedition back, and, although the
entire population of Guadalcanal be des-
troyed, extract from the heart of the Red
One the message of the world from other
worlds.
ButBassett's relapses grewmore frequent,
his brief convalescences less and less
vigor-ous, his periods of coma longer, until he
came to know, beyond the last promptings
of the optimism inherent in so tremendous
a constitution as his own, that he would
never live to cross the grass lands, per-
forate the perilous coast jungle, and reach
the sea. He faded as the Southern Cross
rose higher in the sky, till even Balatta
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THE RED ONE 61
knew that he would be dead ere the nuptial
date determined by his taboo. Ngurn
made pilgrimage personally and gathered
the smoke materials for the curing of
Bassett's head, and to him made proud
announcement and exhibition of the artis-
tic perfectness of his intention when Bassett
should be dead. As for himself, Bassett
was not shocked. Too long and too deeply
had life ebbed down in him to bite him with
fear of its impending extinction. He con-
tinued to persist, alternating periods of
unconsciousness with periods of semi-con-
sciousness, dreamy and unreal, in which he
idly wonderedwhether he had ever
trulybeheld the Red One or whether it was a
nightmare fancy of delirium.
Came the day when all mists and cob-
webs dissolved, when he found his brain
clear as a bell, and took just appraisement
of his body's weakness. Neither hand nor
foot could he lift. So little control of his
body did he have, that he was scarcely
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62 THE RED ONE
aware of possessing one. Lightly indeed
his flesh sat upon his soul, and his soul,
in its briefness of clarity, knew by its very
clarity that the black of cessation was
near. He knew the end was close;knew
that in all truth he had with his eyes
beheld the Red One, the messenger between
the worlds;
knew that he would never
live to carry that message to the world
thatmessage,
for
aughtto the
contrary,which might already have waited man's
hearing in the heart of Guadalcanal for
ten thousand years. And Bassett stirred
with resolve, calling Ngurn to him, out
under the shade of the breadfruit tree, andwith the old devil-devil doctor discussing
the terms and arrangements of his last
life effort, his final adventure in the quick
of the flesh.
I know the law, Ngurn/' he concluded
the matter. Whoso is not of the folk
may not look upon the Red One and live.
I shall not live anyway. Your young men
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THE RED ONE 63
shallcarry
me before the face of the Red
One, and I shall look upon him, and hear
his voice, and thereupon die, under your
hand, O Ngurn. Thus will the three things
be satisfied : the law, my desire, and your
quicker possession of my head for which
all your preparations wait/'
To which Ngurn consented, adding :
It is better so. A sick man who cannot
get well is foolish to live on for so little a
while. Also is it better for the living that
he should go. You have been much in
the way of late. Not but what it was good
for me to talk to such a wise one. But
for moons of
dayswe have held little talk.
Instead, you have taken up room in the
house of heads, making noises like a dying
pig, or talking much and loudly in your
own language which I do not understand.
This has been a confusion to me, for I
like to think on the great things of the
light and dark as I turn the heads in the
smoke. Your much noise has thus been a
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64 THE RED ONE
disturbance to the long-learning and hatch-
ing of the final wisdom that will be mine
before I die. As for you, upon whom the
dark has already brooded, it is well that
you die now. And I promise you, in the
long days to come when I turn your head
in the smoke, no man of the tribe shall
come in to disturb us. And I will tell
you many secrets, for I am an old man
andvery
wise, and I shall beadding
wisdom
to wisdom as I turn your head in the
smoke.
So a litter was made, and, borne on the
shoulders of half a dozen of the men,
Bassett departed on the last little adventure
that was to cap the total adventure, for
him, of living. With a body of which he
was scarcely aware, for even the pain had
been exhausted out of it, and with a bright
clear brain that accommodated him to a
quiet ecstasy of sheer lucidness of thought,
he lay back on the lurching litter and
watched the fading of the passing world,
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THE RED ONE 65
beholding for the last time the breadfruit
tree before the devil-devil house, the dim
day beneath the matted jungle roof, the
gloomy gorge between the shouldering
mountains, the saddle of raw limestone,
and the mesa of black volcanic sand.
Down the spiral path of the pit they
bore him, encircling the sheening, glowing
Red One that seemed ever imminent to
iridesce from colour and light into sweet
singing and thunder. And over bones and
logs of immolated men and gods they bore
him, past the horrors of other immolated
ones that yet lived, to the three-king-
post tripod and the huge king -post
striker.
Here Bassett, helped by Ngurn and
Balatta, weakly sat up, swaying weakly
from the hips, and with clear, unfaltering,
all -seeing eyes gazed upon the Red
One.
Once, Ngurn/' he said, not taking
his eyes from the sheening, vibrating
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66 THE RED ONE
surface whereon and wherein all the shades
of cherry-red played unceasingly, ever
a-quiver to change into sound, to become
silken rustlings, silvery whisperings, golden
thrummings of cords, velvet pipings of
elfland, mellow distances of thunder-
ings.
I wait/' Ngurn prompted after a long
pause, the long-handled tomahawk un-
assumingly ready in his hand. Once, O Ngurn/' Bassett repeated,
let the Red One speak so that I may
see it speak as well as hear it. Then
strike, thus, when I raise my hand; for,
when I raise my hand, I shall drop myhead forward and make place for the
stroke at the base of my neck. But, O
Ngurn, I, who am about to pass out of
the light of day for ever, would like to pass
with the wonder-voice of the Red One
singing greatly in my ears.
And I promise you that never will a
head be so well cured as yours/' Ngurn
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THE RED ONE 67
assured him, at the same time signalling
the tribesmen to man the propelling ropes
suspended from the king-post striker.
Your head shall be my greatest piece of
work in the curing of heads/'
Bassett smiled quietly to the old one's
conceit, as the great carved log, drawn
back through two-score feet of space, was
released. The next moment he was lost
in ecstasy at the abrupt and thunderousliberation of sound. But such thunder
Mellow it was with preciousness of all
sounding metals. Archangels spoke in it;
it was magnificently beautiful before all
other sounds ;it was invested with the
intelligence of supermen of planets of other
suns;
it was the voice of God, seducing
and commanding to be heard. And
the everlasting miracle of that interstellar
metal Bassett, with his own eyes, saw
colour and colours transform into sound till
the whole visible surface of the vast sphere
was a-crawl and titillant and vaporous
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68 THE RED ONE
with what he could not tell was colour or
was sound. In that moment the inter-
stices of matter were his, and the inter-
fusings and intermating transfusings of
matter and force.
Time passed. At the last Bassett was
brought back from his ecstasy by an im-
patient movement of Ngurn. He had
quite forgotten the old devil-devil one. A
quick flash of fancy brought a huskychuckle into Bassett's throat. His shot-
gun lay beside him in the litter. All he
had to do, muzzle to head, was to press the
trigger and blow his head into nothing-
ness.
But why cheat him ? was Bassett's next
thought. Head-hunting, cannibal beast of
a human that was as much ape as human,
nevertheless Old Ngurn had, according to
his lights, played squarer than square.
Ngurn was in himself a forerunner of
ethics and contract, of consideration, and
gentleness in man. No, Bassett decided;
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THE RED ONE 69
it would be a ghastly pity and an act of
dishonour to cheat the old fellow at the
last. His head was Ngurn's, and Ngurn's
head to cure it would be.
And Bassett, raising his hand in signal,
bending forward his head as agreed so as
to expose cleanly the articulation to his
taut spinal cord, forgot Balatta, who was
merely a woman, a woman merely and
only and undesired. He knew, without
seeing, when the razor-edged hatchet rose
in the air behind him. And for that
instant, ere the end, there fell upon Bassett
the shadows of the Unknown, a sense of
impending marvel of the rending of walls
before the imaginable. Almost, when
he knew the blow had started and just ere
the edge of steel bit the flesh and nerves,
it seemed that he gazed upon the serene
face of the Medusa, Truth And, simultane-
ous with the bite of the steel on the onrush
of the dark, in a flashing instant of fancy,
he saw the vision of his head turning^slowly,
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70 THE RED ONE
always turning, in the devil-devil house
beside the breadfruit tree.
THE END
Waikiki, Honolulu,
May 22, 1916.
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THE HUSSY
are some stories that have to
-I be true; the sort that cannot be
fabricated by a ready fiction-reckoner.
And by the same token there are some men
with storiesto tell
whocannot be
doubted.Such a man was Julian Jones. Although
I doubt if the average reader of this will
believe the story Julian Jones told me.
Nevertheless I believe it. So thoroughly
am I convinced of its verity that I am
willing, nay, eager, to invest capital in
the enterprise and embark personally on
the adventure to a far land.
It was in the Australian Building at the
Panama Pacific Exposition that I met
him. I was standing before an exhibit of
facsimiles of the record nuggets which
71
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72 THE HUSSY
had been discovered in the goldfields of
the Antipodes. Knobbed, misshapen and
massive, it was as difficult to believe that
they were not real gold as it was to believe
the accompanying statistics of their weights
and values.
That's what those kangaroo-hunters
call a nugget/' boomed over my shoulder
directly at the largest of the specimens.
I turned and looked up into the dim
blueeyes
ofJulian Jones.
I lookedup,
for he stood something like six feet four
inches in height. His hair, a wispy, sandy
yellow, seemed as dimmed and faded as
his eyes. It may have been the sun which
had washed out his colouring ; at least
his face bore the evidence of a prodigious
and ancient sun-burn which had long since
faded to yellow. As his eyes turned from
the exhibit and focussed on mine I noted
a queer look in them as of one who vainly
tries to recall some fact of supreme im-
portance.
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THE HUSSY 73
What's the matter with it as a nugget ?
I demanded.
The remote, indwelling expression went
out of his eyes as he boomed :
Why, its size.
It does seem large/' I admitted. But
there's no doubt it's authentic. The
Australian Government would scarcely
dare
Large he interrupted, with a sniff
and a sneer. Largest ever discovered
I
started on.
Ever discovered His dim eyes
smouldered hotly as he proceeded. Do
you think that every lump of gold ever
discovered has got into the newspapers
and encyclopedias ?
Well, I replied judicially,
if there's
one that hasn't, I don't see how we're to
know about it. If a really big nugget, or
nugget-finder, elects to blush unseen
But it didn't, he broke inquickly.
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74 THE HUSSY
I saw it with my own eyes, and, besides,
I'm too tanned to blush anyway. I'm a
railroad man and I've been in the tropics
a lot. Why, I used to be the colour of
mahogany real old mahogany, and have
been taken for a blue-eyed Spaniard more
than once
It was my turn to interrupt, and I did.
Was that nugget bigger than those
in there, Mr. er ?
Jones, Julian Jones is
myname.
He dug into an inner pocket and produced
an envelope addressed to such a person,
care of General Delivery, San Francisco;
and I, in turn, presented him with my
card. Pleased to know you, sir, he said,
extending his hand, his voice booming as
if accustomed to loud noises or wide spaces. Of course I've heard of you, seen your
picture in the papers, and all that, and,
though I say it that shouldn't, I want to
say that I didn't care a rap about those
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THE HUSSY 75
articles you wrote on Mexico. You're
wrong, all wrong. You make the mistake
of all Gringos in thinking a Mexican is a
white man. He ain't. None of them
ain't Greasers, Spiggoties, Latin-Ameri-
cans and all the rest of the cattle.
Why,sir, they don't think like we think, or
reason, or act. Even their multiplication
table is different. You think seven times
seven is forty-nine ;but not them. They
work it out different. And white isn't
white to them, either. Let me give you
an example. Buying coffee retail for house-
keeping in one-pound or ten-pound lots
How big was that nugget you referred
to ? I queried firmly. As big as the
biggest of those ?
Bigger, he said quietly. Bigger
than the whole blamed exhibit of them
puttogether, and then some. He paused
and regarded me with a steadfast gaze.
I don't see no reason why I shouldn't
go into the matter with you. You've got
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76 THE HUSSY
a reputation a man ought to be able to
trust, and I've read youVe done some tall
skylarking yourself in out-of-the-way places.
I've been browsing around with an eye
open for some one to go in with me on the
proposition.
You can trust me, I said.
And here I am, blazing out into print
with the whole story just as he told it
to me as we sat on a bench by the lagoon
before the Palace of Fine Arts with the
cries of the sea gulls in our ears. Well,
he should have kept his appointment with
me. But I anticipate.
As we started to leave the building and
hunt for a seat, a small woman, possibly
thirty years of age, with a washed-out
complexion of the farmer's wife sort, darted
up to him in a bird-like way, for all the
world like the darting veering gulls over
our heads, and fastened herself to his arm
with the accuracy and dispatch and inevit-
ableness of a piece of machinery.
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THE HUSSY 77
There you go she shrilled. A-
trottin' right off and never givin' me a
thought/'
I was formally introduced to her. It
was patent that she had never heard of me,
and she
surveyedme
bleakly
with shrewd
black eyes, set close together and as beady
and restless as a bird's.
You ain't goin' to tell him about that
hussy ?
she complained.
Well, now, Sarah, this is business,
you see/' he argued plaintively. I've
been lookin' for a likely man this long
while, and now that he's shown up it seems
to me I got a right to give him the hang
of what happened.
The small woman made no reply, but
set her thin lips in a needle-like line. She
gazed straight before her at the Tower of
Jewels with so austere an expression that
no glint of refracted sunlight could soften
it. We proceeded slowly to the lagoon,
managed to obtain an unoccupied seat,
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78 THE HUSSY
and sat down with mutual sighs of relief
as we released our weights from our tor-
tured sightseeing feet.
One does get so mortal weary/' asserted
the small woman, almost defiantly.
Two swans waddled up from the mirror-
ing water and investigated us. When
their suspicions of our niggardliness or
lack of peanuts had been confirmed, Jones
half-turned his back on his life-partner
and gave me his story. Ever been in Ecuador ? Then take
my advice and don't. Though I take
that back, for you and me might be hitting
it for there together if you can rustle up
the faith in me and the backbone in your-
self for the trip. Well, anyway, it ain't so
many years ago that I came ambling in
there on a rusty, foul-bottomed, tramp
collier from Australia, forty-three days
from land to land. Seven knots was her
speed when everything favoured, and we'd
had a two weeks' gale to the north'ard of
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THE HUSSY 79
New Zealand, and broke our engines down
for two days off Pitcairn Island.
I was no sailor on her. I'm a loco-
motive engineer. But I'd made friends
with the skipper at Newcastle an' come
alongas his
guestfor as far as
Guayaquil.You see, I'd heard wages was 'way up on
the American railroad runnin' from that
place over the Andes to Quito. Now
Guayaquil;
Is a fever-hole, I interpolated.
Julian Jones nodded.
Thomas Nast died there of it within
a month after he landed. He was our
great American cartoonist, I added.
Don't know him, Julian Jones said
shortly. But I do know he wasn't the
first to pass out by a long shot. Why,look you the way I found it. The pilot
grounds is sixty miles down the river.
'
How's the fever ?'
said I to the pilot
who came aboard in the early morning.'
See that Hamburg barque,' said he,
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80 THE HUSSY
pointing to a sizable ship at anchor.
'
Captain and fourteen men dead of it
already, and the cook and two men dying
right now, and they're the last left of her.'
And by jinks he told the truth. And
right then they were dying forty a day in
Guayaquil of Yellow Jack. But that was
nothing, as I was to find out. Bubonic
plague and small-pox were raging, while
dysentery and pneumonia were reducing
thepopulation,
and the railroad wasraging
worst of all. I mean that. For them
that insisted in riding on it, it was more
dangerous than all the other diseases put
together.
When we dropped anchor off Guaya-
quil half a dozen skippers from other
steamers came on board to warn our
skipper not to let any of his crew or officers
go ashore except the ones he wanted to
lose. A launch came off for me from
Duran, which is on the other side of the
river and is the terminal of the railroad.
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THE HUSSY 81
And it brought off a man that soared upthe gangway three jumps at a time he was
that eager to get aboard. When he hit
the deck he hadn't time to speak to any
of us. He just leaned out over the rail
and shook his fist at Duran and shouted :
1
1 beat you to it I beat you to it
'
'
Who'd you beat to it, friend ?'
I
asked.'
The railroad/ he said, as he
unbuckled the straps and took off a big
'44 Colt's automatic from where he wore
it handy on his left side under his coat.
'
I stayed as long as I agreed three months
and it didn't get me. I was a conductor.'
Andthat was the railroad I
wasto
work for. All of which was nothing to
what he told me in the next few minutes.
The road ran from sea level at Duran
up to twelve thousand feet on Chim-
borazo and down to ten thousand at
Quito on the other side the range.
And it was so dangerous that the trains
didn't run nights. The through passengers
R.O. F
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82 THE HUSSY
had to get off and sleep in the towns at
night while the train waited for daylight.
And each train carried a guard of Ecua-
doriano soldiers which was the most
dangerous of all. They were supposed
to protect the train crews, but whenevertrouble started they unlimbered their rifles
and joined the mob. You see, whenever
a train wreck occurred, the first cry of
the Spiggoties was'
Kill the Gringos
'
They always did that, and proceeded to
kill the train crew and whatever chance
Gringo passengers that'd escaped being
killed in the accident. Which is their
kind of arithmetic, which I told you a
while back as being different from ours.
Shucks Before the day was out I
was to find out for myself that that ex-
conductor wasn't lying. It was over at
Duran. I was to take
myrun on the first
division out to Quito, for which place I
was to start next morning only one
through train running every twenty-four
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THE HUSSY 83
hours. It was the afternoonof
myfirst
day, along about four o'clock, when the
boilers of the Governor Hancock exploded
and she sank in sixty feet of water along-
side the dock. She was the big ferry-
boat that carried the railroad passengers
across the river to Guayaquil. It was a
bad accident, but it was the cause of worse
that followed. By half-past four, big
trainloads began to arrive. It was a feast
day and they'd run an excursion up country
out of Guayaquil, and this was the crowd
coming back.
And the crowd there was five thou-
sand of them wanted toget
ferriedacross,
and the ferry was at the bottom of the
river, which wasn't our fault. But by
the Spiggoty arithmetic, it was.'
Kill
the Gringos
'
shouts one of them. And
right there the beans were spilled. Most
of us got away by the skin of our teeth.
I raced on the heels of the Master Mechanic,
carrying one of his babies for him, for the
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84 THE HUSSY
locomotives that was just pulling out.
You see, way down there away from
everywhere they just got to save their
locomotives in times of trouble, because,
without them, a railroad can't be run.
Half a dozen American wives and as
many children were crouching on the cab
floors along with the rest of us when
we pulled out;
and the Ecuadoriano
soldiers, who should have been protecting
our lives and property, turned loose with
their rifles and must have given us all of a
thousand rounds before we got out of
range. We
camped up countryand didn't
come back to clean up until next day.
It was some cleaning. Every flat-car,
box-car, coach, asthmatic switch engine,
and even hand-car that mob of Spiggoties
had shoved off the dock into sixty feet of
water on top of the Governor Hancock.
They'd burnt the round house, set fire to
the coal bunkers, and made a scandal of
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THE HUSSY 85
the repair shops. Oh, yes, and there were
three of our fellows they'd got that we
had to bury mighty quick. It's hot
weather all the time down there.
Julian Jones came to a full pause and
over his shoulder studied the straight-
before-her gaze and forbidding expression
of his wife's face.
'
I ain't forgotten the nugget, he as-
sured me.
Nor the hussy, the little womansnapped, apparently at the mud-hens pad-
dling on the surface of the lagoon. I've been travelling toward the nugget
right along
There was never no reason for you to
stay in that dangerous country, his wife
snapped in on him.
Now, Sarah, he appealed.
I was
working for you right along. And to
me he explained :
The risk was big,
but so was the pay. Some months I
earned as high as five hundred gold. And
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86 THE HUSSY
here was Sarah waiting for me back in
Nebraska
An' us engaged two years/' she com-
plained to the Tower of Jewels. What of the strike, and me being
blacklisted, and getting typhoid down in
Australia, and everything, he went on.
And luck was with me on that railroad.
Why, I saw fellows fresh from the States
pass out, some of them not a week on their
first run. If the diseases and the railroad
didn't get them, then it was the Spig-
goties got them. But it just wasn't my
fate, even that time I rode my engine
down to the bottom of a forty-foot washout.
I lost my fireman ; and the conductor
and the Superintendent of Rolling Stock
(who happened to be running down to
Duran to meet his bride) had their heads
knifed off by the Spiggoties and paraded
around on poles. But I lay snug as a bug
under a couple of feet of tender coal, and
they thought I'd headed for tall timber
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THE HUSSY 87
lay there a day and a night till the
excitement cooled down. Yes, I was lucky.
The worst that happened to me was I
caught a cold once, and another time had
a carbuncle. But the other fellows They
died like flies, what of Yellow Jack, pneu-
monia, the Spiggoties, and the railroad.
The trouble was I didn't have much chance
to pal with them. No sooner'd I get
some intimate with one of them he'd up
and die all but a fireman namedAndrews,
and he went loco for keeps.
I made good on my job from the
first, and lived in Quito in a 'dobe house
with whacking big Spanish tiles on the
roof that I'd rented. And I never hadmuch trouble with the Spiggoties, what
of letting them sneak free rides in the
tender or on the cowcatcher. Me throw
them off ? Never I took notice, when
Jack Harris put off a bunch of them, that
I attended his funeral muy pronto
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88 THE HUSSY
Speak English/' the little woman
besidehim snapped.
Sarah just can't bear to tolerate me
speaking Spanish/' he apologized. It
gets so on her nerves that I promised
not to. Well, as I was saying, the goose
hung high and everything was going hunky-
dory, and I was piling up my wages to
come north to Nebraska and marry Sarah,
when I run on to Vahna
The hussy Sarah hissed.
Now, Sarah/' her towering giant of a
husband begged,
I just got to mention
her or I can't tell about the nugget. It
was one night when I was taking a loco-
motive no train down to
Amato,about
thirty miles from Quito. Seth Manners
was my fireman. I was breaking him in
to engineer for himself, and I was letting
him run the locomotive while I sat up in
his seat meditating about Sarah here.
I'd just got a letter from her, begging as
usual for me to come home and hinting
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THE HUSSY 89
as usual about the dangers of an unmarried
man like me running around loose in a
country full of senoritas and fandangos.
Lord If she could only a-seen them.
Positive frights, that's what they are,
their faces painted white as corpses and
their lips red as as some of the train
wrecks I've helped clean up.
It was a lovely April night, not a
breath of wind, and a tremendous big
moon shining right over the top of Chim-borazo. Some mountain that. The rail-
road skirted it twelve thousand feet above
sea level, and the top of it ten thousand
feet higher than that.
Mebbe I was drowsing, with Seth
running the engine ;but he slammed on
the brakes so sudden hard that I darn
near went through the cab window.
'
What the'
I started to yell,and
'
Holy hell/ Seth says, as both of us
looked at what was on the track. And I
agreed with Seth entirelyin his remark,
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go THE HUSSY
It was an Indian girl and take it from
me, Indians ain't ,Spiggoties by any manner
of means. Seth had managed to fetch
a stop within twenty feet of her, and us
bowling down hill at that But the girl.
She
I saw the form of Mrs. Julian Jones
stiffen, although she kept her gaze fixed
balefully upon two mud-hens that were
prowling along the lagoon shallows below
us. The
hussy she hissed, once and
implacably. Jones had stopped at the
sound, but went on immediately. She was a tall girl,
slim and slender,
you know the kind, with black hair,
remarkably long hanging, down loose behind
her, as she stood there no more afraid
than nothing, her arms spread out to stop
the engine. She was wearing a slimpsy
sort of garment wrapped around her that
wasn't cloth but ocelot skins, soft and
dappled,^and silky. It was all she had
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THE HUSSY 91
The hussy breathed Mrs. Jones.
But Mr. Jones went on, making believe
that he was unaware of the interruption.
'Hell of a way to stop a locomotive/
I complained at Seth, as I climbed down on
to theright
of
way.I walked
pastour
engine and up to the girl,and what do
you think ? Her eyes were shut tight.
She was trembling that violent that you
could see it by the moonlight. And she
was barefoot, too. '
What's the row ?'
I said, none
too gentle. She gave a start, seemed
to come out of her trance, and opened
her eyes. Say They were big and black
and beautiful. Believe me, she was some
looker
The hussy At which hiss the two
mud-hens veered away a few feet. But
Jones
wasgetting
himself in hand, and
didn't even blink.
'
What are you stopping this loco-
motive for ?'
I demanded in Spanish,
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THE HUSSY 93
Next thing, Seth yells at me,
'
Coin' to
stay here all night ?'
'
Come on/ I said to the girl,
'
and
climb on board. But next time you want
a ride don't flag a locomotive between
stations/ She followed along; but when
I got to the step and turned to give her a
lift-up, she wasn't there. I went forward
again. Not a sign of her. Above and
below was sheer cliff, and the track
stretched ahead a hundred yards clear and
empty. And then I spotted her, crouched
down right against the cowcatcher, that
close I'd almost stepped on her. If we'd
startedup, we'd have run over
her ina
second. It was all so nonsensical, I never
could make out her actions. Maybe she
was trying to suicide. I grabbed her by
the wrist and jerked her none too gentle
to her feet. And she came along all
right. Women do know when a man
means business.
I glanced from this Goliath to his little,
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94 THE HUSSY
bird-eyed spouse, and wondered if he had
ever tried to mean business with her.
Seth kicked at first, but I boosted her
into the cab and made her sit up beside
me
And I suppose Seth was busy runningthe engine/' Mrs. Jones observed.
I was breaking him in, wasn't I ?
Mr. Jones protested. So we made the
run into Amato. She'd never opened her
mouth once, and no sooner 'd the engine
stopped than she'd jumped to the ground
and was gone. Just like that. Not a
thank you kindly. Nothing. But next morning, when we came to
pull out for Quito with a dozen flat cars
loaded with rails, there she was in the cab
waiting for us;
and in the daylight I
could see how much better a looker she
wasthan the
nightbefore.
' Huh she's adopted you, Seth grins.
And it looked like it. She just stood there
and looked at me at usr like a loving
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THE HUSSY 95
hound dogthat
you love,that
you've
caught with a string of sausages inside
of him, and that just knows you ain't
going to lift a hand to him.'
Go chase
yourself
'
I told her pronto. (Mrs. Jones
made her proximity noticeable with a
wince at the Spanish word.) You see,
Sarah, I'd no use for her, even at the
start.
Mrs. Jones stiffened. Her lips moved
soundlessly, but I knew to what syllables. And what made it hardest was Seth
jeering at me.'
You can't shake her
that way,' he said.'
You saved her life
'
'Ididn't,'
I said
sharply;'it
was you/'
But she thinks you did, which
is the same thing,' he came back at me.
'
And now she belongs to you. Custom
of the country, as you ought to know.'
Heathenish, said Mrs. Jones, and
though her steady gaze wtas set upon the
Tower of Jewels I knew she was making
no reference to its architecture.
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96 THE HUSSY
'
She's come to dolight housekeeping
for you/ Seth grinned. I let him rave,
though afterwards I kept him throwing
in the coal too fast to work his mouth
very much. Why, say, when I got to
the spot where I picked her up, and stopped
the train for her to get off, she just flopped
down on her knees, got a hammerlock
with her arms around my knees, and
cried all over my shoes. What was I
to do ?
With no perceptible movement that I
was aware of, Mrs. Jones advertised her
certitude of knowledge of what she would
have done.
And the moment we pulled into Quito,
she did what she'd done before vanished.
Sarah never believes me when I say how
relieved I felt to be quit of her. But it
was not to be. I got to my 'dobe houseand managed a cracking fine dinner mycook had ready for me. She was mostly
Spiggoty and half Indian, and her name
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THE HUSSY 97
wasPaloma.
Now, Sarah,haven't I told
you she was older'n a grandmother, and
looked more like a buzzard than a dove ?
Why, I couldn't bear to eat with her
around where I could look at her. But
she did make things comfortable, and she
was some economical when it came to
marketing. That afternoon, after a big long siesta,
what'd I find in the kitchen, just as much
at home as if she belonged there, but that
blamed Indiangirl.
And old Paloma was
squatting at the girl's feet and rubbing
the girl's knees and legs like for rheumatism,
which I knew thegirl
didn't have from the
way I'd sized up the walk of her, and
keeping time to the rubbing with a funny
sort of gibberish chant. And I let loose
right there and then. As Sarah knows, I
never could a-bear women around the
house young, unmarried women, I mean.
But it was no go Old Paloma sided with
thegirl, and said if the girl went she went,
R.O. O
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98 THE HUSSY
too. Also, she called me more kinds of a
fool than the English language has accom-
modation for. You'd like the Spanish
lingo, Sarah, for expressing yourself in such
ways, and you'd have liked old Paloma,
too. She was a good woman, though shedidn't have any teeth and her face could
kill a strong man's appetite in the
cradle.
I gave in. I had to. Except for the
excuse that she needed Vahna's help around
the house (which she didn't atall),
old
Paloma never said why she stuck up for
the girl. Anyway, Vahna was a quiet
thing, never in the way. And she never
gadded. Just sat in-doors jabbering with
Paloma and helping with the chores. But
I wasn't long in getting on to that she
was afraid of something. She would look
up,that anxious it hurt, whenever
anybodycalled, like some of the boys to have a
gas or a game of pedro. I tried to worm
it out of Paloma what was worrying the
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THE HUSSY 99
girl,but all the old
womandid was to look
solemn and shake her head like all the
devils in hell was liable to precipitate a
visit on us.
And then one day Vahna had a visitor.
I'd just come in from a run and was passing
the time of day with her I had to be
polite, even if she had butted in on me and
come to live in my house for keeps when
I saw a queer expression come into her
eyes. In the doorway stood an Indian
boy. He looked like her, but was younger
and slimmer. She took him into the
kitchen and they must have had a great
palaver,
for he didn't leave until after
dark. Inside the week he came back,
but I missed him. When I got home,
Paloma put a fat nugget of gold into myhand, which Vahna had sent him for.
The blamed thing weighed all of two
pounds and was worth more than five
hundred dollars. She explained that
Vahna wanted me to take it to pay for her
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ioo THE HUSSY
keep. And I had to take it to keep peace
in the house.
Then, after a long time, came
another visitor. We were sitting before
the fire- -
Him and the hussy/' quoth Mrs. Jones. And Paloma, he added quickly.
Him and his cook and his light house-
keeper sitting by the fire/' she amended. Oh, I admit Vahna did like me a whole
heap/' he asserted recklessly, then modified
with a pang of caution : A heap more
than was good for her, seeing that I had
no inclination her way. Well, as I was saying, she had another
.visitor. He was a lean, tall, white-headed
old Indian, with a beak on him like an
eagle. He walked right in without knock-
ing. Vahna gave a little cry that was
half like ayelp
and half like agasp,
and
flumped down on her knees before me,
pleading to me with deer's eyes and to
him with the eyes of a deer about to be
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THE HUSSY 101
killed that don't want to be killed. Then,
for a minute that seemed as long as a life-
time, she and the old fellow glared at
each other. Paloma was the first to talk,
in his own lingo, for he talked back to her.
But great Moses, if he wasn't the high
and mighty one Paloma's old knees
were shaking, and she cringed to him like
a hound dog. And all this in my own
house I'd have thrown him out on his
neck, only he was so old.
If the things he said to Vahna were
as terrible as the way he looked Say
He just spit words at her But Paloma
kept whimpering and butting in,till
some-
thing she said got across, because his face
relaxed. He condescended to give me the
once over and fired some question at Vahna.
She hung her head, and looked foolish,
and blushed, and then replied with a
single word and a shake of the head. And
with that he just naturally turned on his
heel and beat it. I guess she'd said'
No/
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THE HUSSY 103
have canned my joy, for I was jobbed out
of it by the courts and lawyers afterward
not a cent to me, and I'm still paying
'm in instalments.
But I didn't know, then
;and I pre-
pared to pull back to God's country.Paloma got sore, and Vahna got the
weeps.'
Don't go Don't go
'
That
was her song. But I gave notice on my
job, and wrote a letter to Sarah here
didn't I, Sarah ?
* That night, sitting by the fire like at
a funeral, Vahna really loosened up for
the first time.
'
Don't go,' she says to me, with
old Paloma nodding agreement with her.
1
I'll show you where my brother got the
nugget, if you don't go.''
Too late,' said
I. And I told her why. And told her about me
waitingfor
youback in Nebraska, Mrs. Jones observed
in cold, passionless tones.
Now, Sarah, why should I hurt a poor
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104 THE HUSSY
Indian girl's feelings ? Of course I didn't.
Well, she and Paloma talked Indian
some more, and then Vahna says :
'
If
you stay, 111 show you the biggest nugget
that is the father of all other nuggets.'' How
big
?'
I asked.'
Asbig
as me ?'
She laughed.'
Bigger than you,' she says,'
much, much bigger.''
They don't grow
that way,' I said. But she said she'd
seen it and Paloma backed her up. Why,
to listen to them you'd have thoughtthere was millions in that one nugget.
Paloma 'd never seen it herself, but she'd
heard about it. A secret of the tribe which
she couldn't share, being only half Indian
herself.
Julian Jones paused and heaved a sigh.
And they kept on insisting until I
fell for
The hussy, said Mrs. Jones, pert as
a bird, at the ready instant.
No;
for the nugget. What of Aunt
Eliza's farm I was rich enough to quit
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THE HUSSY 105
railroading, but not rich enough to turn
my back on big money and I just couldn't
help believing them two women. Gee
I could be another Vanderbilt, or J. P.
Morgan. That's the way I thought ;and
I
startedin to
pumpVahna. But she
wouldn't give down.'
You come along
with me/ she says. 'We can be back
here in a couple of weeks with all the
gold the both of us can carry/ 'Well
take a burro, or a pack-train of burros/
was my suggestion. But nothing doing.
And Paloma agreed with her. It was too
dangerous. The Indians would catch us.
The two of us pulled out when the
nights were moonlight. We travelled only
at night, and laid up in the days. Vahna
wouldn't let me light a fire, and I missed
my coffee something fierce. We got up
in the real
highmountains of the main
Andes, where the snow on one pass gave
us some trouble;
but the girl knew the
trails, and, though we didn't waste any
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106 THE HUSSY
time, we were a full week getting there.
I know the general trend of our travel,
because I carried a pocket compass ;and
the general trend is all I need to get there
again, because of that peak. There's no
mistaking
it. There ain't another
peaklike it in the world. Now, I'm not telling
you its particular shape, but when you
and I head out for it from Quito 111 take
you straight to it.
It's no easy thing to climb, and the
person doesn't live that can climb it at
night. We had to take the daylight to
it, and didn't reach the top till after sunset.
Why, I could take hours and hours telling
you about that last climb, which I
won't. The top was flat as a billiard
table, about a quarter of an acre in size,
and was almost clean of snow. Vahna
told me that the great winds that usually
blew, kept the snow off of it.
We were winded, and I got mountain
sickness so bad that I had to stretch out
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THE HUSSY 107
for a spell. Then, when the moon come
up, I took a prowl around. It didn't
take long, and I didn't catch a sight or
a smell of anything that looked like gold.
And when I asked Vahna, she only laughed
and clapped her hands. Meantime mymountain sickness tuned up something
fierce, and I sat down on a big rock to
wait for it to ease down. (
Come on, now/ I said, when I felt
better.'
Stop your fooling and tell mewhere that nugget is.' 'It's nearer to
you right now than I'll ever get,' she
answered, her big eyes going sudden wist-
ful.'
All you Gringos are alike. Gold is
the love of your heart, and women don't
count much.'
I didn't say anything. That was no
time to tell her about Sarah here. But
Vahna seemed to shakeoff
her depressed
feelings, and began to laugh and tease
again.' How do you like it ?
'
she asked.
'Like what ?' *
The nugget you're sitting on.'
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ic8 THE HUSSY
I jumped up as though it was a red-
hot stove. And all it was was a rock. I
felt my heart sink. Either she had gone
clean loco, or this was her idea of a joke.
Wrong on both counts. She gave me
the hatchet and told me to take a hack
at the boulder, which I did, again and again,
for yellow spots sprang up from under
every blow. By the great Moses it was
gold The whole blamed boulder
Jones rose suddenly to his full height
and flung out his long arms, his face turned
to the southern skies. The movement
shot panic into the heart of a swan that
had drawn nearer with amiably predatory
designs. Its consequent abrupt retreat
collided it with a stout old lady, who
squealed and dropped her bag of peanuts.
Jones sat down and resumed.
Gold, I tell you, solid gold and that
pure and soft that I chopped chips out
of it. It had been coated with some sort
of rain-proof paint or lacquer made out
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THE HUSSY 109
of asphalt or something. No wonder I'd
taken it for a rock. It was ten feet long,
all of five feet through, and tapering to
both ends like an egg. Here. Take a
look at this.
From his pocket he drew and opened aleather case, from which he took an object
wrapped in tissue-paper. Unwrapping it,
he dropped into my hand a chip of pure
soft gold the size of a ten-dollar gold-
piece. I could make out the greyish
substance on one side with which it had
been painted.
I chopped that from one end of the
thing/' Jones went on, replacing the chip
in its paper and leather case. And lucky
I put it in my pocket. For right at myback came one loud word more like a
croak than a word, in my way of thinking.
And there was that lean old fellow withthe eagle beak that had dropped in on us
one night. And there was about thirty
Indians with him- all slim young fellows.
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no THE HUSSY
Vahna'd flopped down and begun whim-
pering, but I told her,'
Get up and make
friends with them for me.''
No, no/ she
cried.'
This is death. Good-bye, amigo'
Here Mrs. Jones winced, and her husband
abruptlychecked the
particular
flow of
his narrative.
'
Then get up and fight along with
me/ I said to her. And she did. She
was some hellion, there on the top of the
world, clawing and scratching tooth andnail a regular srje cat. And I wasn't
idle, though all I had was that hatchet and
my long arms. But they were too many
for me, and there was no place for me to
put my back against a wall. When I
come to, minutes after they'd cracked me
on the head here, feel this/'
Removing his hat, Julian Jones guided
my finger tips through his thatch of sandy
hair until they sank into an indentation.
It was fully three inches long, and went
into the bone itself of the skull.
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THE HUSSY in
When I come to, there was Vahna,
spread-eagled on top of the nugget, and the
old fellow with a beak jabbering away
solemnly as if going through some sort
of religious exercises. In his hand he
had a stone knife you know, a thin,
sharp sliver of some obsidian-like stuff
same as they make arrow-heads out of. I
couldn't lift a hand, being held down, and
being too weak besides. And well, any-
way, that stone knife did for her, and me
they didn't even do the honour of killing
there on top their sacred peak. They
chucked me off of it like so much
carrion.
And the buzzards didn't get me either.
I can see the moonlight yet, shining on
all those peaks of snow, as I went down.
Why, sir, it was a five-hundred-foot fall,
onlyI didn't
makeit. I
wentinto a
bigsnow-drift in a crevice. And when I
come to (hours after I know, for it was
full day when I next saw the sun), I found
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H2 THE HUSSY
myself in a regular snow-cave or tunnel
caused by the water from the melting snow
running along the ledge. In fact, the
stone above actually overhung just beyond
where I first landed. A few feet more
to theside,
eitherway, and
I'dalmost be
going yet. It was a straight miracle,
that's what it was.
But I paid for it. It was two years
and over before I knew what happened.
All I knew was that I was Julian Jones
and that I'd been blacklisted in the big
strike, and that I was married to Sarah
here. I mean that. I didn't know any-
thing in between, and when Sarah tried
to talk about it, it gave me pains in the
head. I mean my head was queer, and
I knew it was queer. And then, sitting on the porch of
her father's farmhouse back in Nebraska
one moonlight evening, Sarah came out
and put that gold chip into my hand.
Seems she'd just found it in the torn
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THE HUSSY 113
liningof
the trunkI'd
brought backfrom
Ecuador I who for two years didn't
even know I'd been to Ecuador, or Aus-
tralia, or anything Well, I just sat
there looking at the chip in the moonlight,
and turning it over and over and figuring
what it was and where it'd come from,
when all of a sudden there was a snap
inside my head as if something had broken,
and then I could see Vahna spread-eagled
on that big nugget and the old fellow with
the beak waving the stone knife, and . . .
and everything. That is, everything that
had happened from the time I first left
Nebraska to when I crawled to thedaylight
out of the snow after they had chucked me
off the mountain-top. But everything
that'd happened after that I'd clean for-
gotten. When Sarah said I was her
husband, I wouldn't listen to her. Tookall her family and the preacher that'd
married us to convince me.
Later on I wrote to Seth Manners.
R.O, H
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H4 THE HUSSY
The railroad hadn't killed himyet,
and
he pieced out a lot for me. Ill show
you his letters. I've got them at the
hotel. One day, he said, making his regular
run, I crawled out on to the track. I
didn't stand upright, I just crawled. Hetook me for a calf, or a big dog, at first. I
wasn't anything human, he said, and I
didn't know him or anything. As near
as I can make out, it was ten days after
the mountain-top to the time Seth picked
me up. What I ate I don't know. Maybe
I didn't eat. Then it was doctors at Quito,
and Paloma nursing me (she must have
packed that gold chip in my trunk), until
they found out I was a man without a
mind, and the railroad sent me back to
Nebraska. At any rate, that's what Seth
writes me. Of myself, I don't know. But
Sarahhere knows. She
correspondedwith
the railroad before they shipped me and
all that.
Mrs. Jones nodded affirmation of his
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THE HUSSY 115
words, sighed and evidenced unmistakable
signs of eagerness to go.
I ain't been able to work since/'
her husband continued. And I ain't
been able to figure out how to get back
that big nugget. Sarah's got money of
her own, and she won't let go a penny :
He won't get down to that country
no more she broke forth.
But, Sarah,Vahna's dead
youknow
that, Julian Jones protested.
I don't know anything about any-
thing, she answered decisively, expect
that that country is no place for a married
man.Her lips snapped together, and she fixed
an unseeing stare across to where the after-
noon sun was beginning to glow into sunset.
I gazed for a moment at her face, white,
plump, tiny, and implacable, and gave
her up. How do you account for such a mass
of gold being there ?
I queried of Julian
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n6 THE HUSSY
Jones. A solid-goldmeteor that fell
out of the sky ?
Not for a moment/' He shook his
head.
It was carried there by the
Indians/'
Up a mountain like that and such
enormous weight and size I objected. Just as easy/' he smiled.
I used to
be stumped by that proposition myself,
after I got my memory back. 'Now how
in Sam Hill I used to begin, and
then spend hours figuring at it. And then
when I got the answer I felt downright
idiotic, it was that easy/' He paused,
then announced:
Theydidn't.
But you just said they did.
They did and they didn't, was his
enigmatic reply. Of course they never
carried that monster nugget up there.
What they did was to carry up its contents/'
He waited until he saw enlightenment
dawn in my face.
And then of course melted all the gold,
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THE HUSSY 117
or welded it, or smelted it, all into one piece.
You know the first Spaniards down there,
under a leader named Pizarro, were a
gang of robbers and cut-throats. They
went through the country like the hoof-
and-mouth disease, and killed the Indians
off like cattle. You see, the Indians had
lots of gold. Well, what the Spaniards
didn't get, the surviving Indians hid away
in that one big chunk on top the mountain,and it's been waiting there ever since for
me and for you, if you want to go in
on it.
And here, by the Lagoon of the Palace
of Fine Arts, ended my acquaintance with
Julian Jones. On my agreeing to finance
the adventure, he promised to call on me
at my hotel next morning with the letters
of Seth Manners and the railroad, and
conclude arrangements. But he did not
call. That evening I telephoned his hotel
and was informed by the clerk that Mr.
Julian Jones and wife had departed in
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n8 THE HUSSY
the early afternoon with their baggage.Can Mrs. Jones have rushed him back
and hidden him away in Nebraska ? I
remember that as we said good-bye, there
was that in her smile that recalled the
vulpine complacency of Mona Lisa, the
Wise.
THE END
Kohala, Hawaii,
May 5, 1916.
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LIKE ARGUS OF THE ANCIENTTIMES
ITwas the summer of 1897, and there
was trouble in the Tarwater family.
Grandfather Tarwater, after remaining pro-
perly subdued and crushed for a quiet
decade, had broken out again. This time
it was the Klondike fever. His first and
one unvarying symptom of such attacks
was song. One chant only he raised,
thoughhe remembered no more than the
first stanza and but three lines of that.
And the family knew his feet were itching
and his brain was tingling with the old
madness, when he lifted his hoarse-cracked
voice, now falsetto-cracked, in:
Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this modern Greece,
Turn-turn, turn-turn, turn, turn, turn-turn,
To shear the Golden Fleece.
119
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120 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
Ten years earlier he had lifted the chant,
sung to the air of the Doxology, when
afflicted with the fever to go gold-mining
in Patagonia. The multitudinous family
had sat upon him, but had had a hard
time doing it. When all else had failed
to shake his resolution, they had applied
lawyers to him, with the threat of getting
out guardianship papers and of confining
him in the state asylum for the insane
which was reasonable for a man who had,
a quarter of a century before, speculated
away all but ten meagre acres of a Cali-
fornia principality, and who had displayed
no better business acumen ever since.
The application of lawyers to John
Tarwater was like the application of a
mustard plaster. For, in his judgment,
they were the gentry, more than any
other, who had skinned him out of the
broad Tarwater acres. So, at the time of
his Patagonian fever, the very thought of
so drastic a remedy was sufficient to cure
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 121
him. He quickly demonstrated he wasnot crazy by shaking the fever from him
and agreeing not to go to Patagonia.
Next, he demonstrated how crazy he
really was, by deeding over to his family,
unsolicited, the ten acres on Tarwater
Flat, the house, barn, outbuildings, and
water-rights. Also did he turn over the
eight hundred dollars in bank that was
the long-saved salvage of his wrecked
fortune. But for this the family found no
cause for committal to the asylum, since
such committal would necessarily invali-
date what he had done.
Grandfather is sure peeved/' said Mary,his oldest daughter, herself a grandmother,
when her father quit smoking.
All he had retained for himself was a
span of old horses, a mountain buckboard,
and his one room in the crowded house.
Further, having affirmed that he would be
beholden to none of them, he got the
contract to carry the United States mail,
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122 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
twice a week, from Kelterville up over
Tarwater Mountain to Old Almaden
which was a sporadically worked quick-
silver mine in the upland cattle country.
With his old horses it took all his time to
make the two weekly round trips. Andfor ten years, rain or shine, he had never
missed atrip. Nor had he failed once to
pay his week's board into Mary's hand.
This board he had insisted on, in the
convalescence from his Patagonian fever,
and he had paid it strictly, though he had
given up tobacco in order to be able to
do it.
Huh
'
he confided to the ruined
water wheel of the old Tarwater Mill, which
he had built from the standing timber and
which had ground wheat for the first
settlers. Huh They'll never put me
inthe poor farm
solong
as I
support
myself. And without a penny to my name
it ain't likely any lawyer fellows'll come
snoopin' around after me/'
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 123
And yet, precisely because of these
highly rational acts, it was held that John
Tarwater was mildly crazy
The first time he had lifted the chant
of Like Argus of the Ancient Times,
had been in 1849, when, twenty-two years
of age, violently attacked by the Californian
fever, he had sold two hundred and forty
Michigan acres, forty of it cleared, for the
price of four yoke of oxen and a wagon,
and had started across the Plains.
And we turned off at Fort Hall, where
the Oregon emigration went north'ard, and
swung south for Californy, was his way of
concluding the narrative of that arduous
journey. And Bill Ping and me used to
rope grizzlies out of the underbrush of
Cache Slough in the Sacramento Valley/'
Years of freighting and mining had
followed, and, with a stake gleaned from
the Merced placers, he satisfied the land-
hunger of his race and time by settling in
Sonoma County,
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124 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
Duringthe ten
yearsof
carryingthe
mail across Tarwater Township, up Tar-
water Valley, and over Tarwater Mountain,
most all of which land had once been his,
he had spent his time dreaming of winning
back that land before he died. And now,
his huge gaunt form more erect than it had
been for years, with a glinting of blue fires
in his small and close-set eyes, he was
lifting his ancient chant again.
There he goes now listen to him/'
said William Tarwater.
Nobody at home/' laughed Harris
Topping, day labourer, husband of Annie
Tarwater, and father of her nine children.
The kitchen door opened to admit the
old man, returning from feeding his horses.
Thesong
had ceased from hislips ;
but
Mary was irritable from a burnt hand and
a grandchild whose stomach refused to
digest properly diluted cows' milk,
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 125
Now there ain't no use you carryin' onthat way, father/' she tackled him.
The
time's past for you to cut and run for a
place like the Klondike, and singing won't
but you nothing.
Just the same, he answered quietly.
I bet I could go to that Klondike place
and pick up enough gold to buy back the
Tarwater lands.
Old fool Annie contributed.
u You couldn't buy them back for less'n
three hundred thousand and then some,
was William's effort at squelching him.
Then I could pick up three hundred
thousand,and then
some,if I was
onlythere, the old man retorted placidly.
Thank God you can't walk there, or
you'd be startin', I know, Mary cried.
Ocean travel costs money.
I used to have money, her father said
humbly. Well, you ain't got any now so forget
it, William advised. Them times is
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126 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
past, like
ropingbear with Bill
Ping.There ain't no more bear/'
Just the same
But Mary cut him off. Seizing the day's
paper from the kitchen table, she flourished
it savagely under her aged progenitor's nose.'
What do those Klondikers say ? There
it is in cold print. Only the young and
robust can stand the Klondike. It's worse
than the north pole. And they've left
their dead a-plenty there themselves. Look
at their pictures. You're forty years older
'n the oldest of them.
John Tarwater did look, but his eyes
strayed to other photographs on the highly
sensational front page. And look at the photys of them nuggets
they brought down, he said.
I know
gold. Didn't I gopher twenty thousand
outa the Merced ?
Andwouldn't it a-ben
a hundred thousand if that cloudburst
hadn't busted my wing-dam ? Now if I
was only in the Klondike
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 127
Crazy as a loon/' William sneered in
open aside to the rest.
A nice way to talk to your father/'
Old Man Tarwater censured mildly. My
father 'd have walloped the tar out of me
with a single-tree if I'd spoke to him
that way/' But you are crazy, father
William
began. Reckon you're right, son. And that's
where my father wasn't crazy. He'd a-
done it.
The old man's been reading some of
them magazine articles about men who
succeeded after forty, Annie jibed. And why not, daughter ?
he asked.
And why can't a man succeed after
he's seventy ? I was only seventy this
year. And mebbe I could succeed if only
I could get to the Klondike
Which you ain't going to get to, Mary
shut him off.
Oh, well, then, he sighed, seein's
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128 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
I ain't, I might just as well go to bed/'
He stood up, tall, gaunt, great-boned
and gnarled, a splendid ruin of a man.
His ragged hair and whiskers were not
grey but snowy white, as were the tufts
of hair that stood out on the backs of his
huge bony fingers. He moved toward the
door, opened it, sighed, and paused with a
backward look.
Just the same/' he murmured plain-
tively,
the bottoms of
myfeet is
itchingsomething terrible/'
Long before the family stirred next
morning, his horses fed and harnessed by
lantern light, breakfast cooked and eaten
by lamp light. Old Man Tarwater was off
and away down Tarwater Valley on the
road to Kelterville. Two things were un-
usual about this usual trip which he had
made a thousand and forty times since
taking the mail contract. He did not drive
to Kelterville, but turned off on the main
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 129
road south to Santa Rosa. Even more
remarkable than this was the paper-
wrapped parcel between his feet. It
contained his one decent black suit, which
Mary had been long reluctant to see him
wear any more, not because it was shabby,but because, as he guessed what was at
the back of her mind, it was decent enough
to bury him in.
And at Santa Rosa, in a second-hand
clothes shop, he sold the suit outright for
two dollars and a half. From the same
obliging shopman he received four dollars
for the wedding ring of his long-dead wife.
The span of horses and the wagon he
disposed of for seventy-five dollars, al-
though twenty-five was all he received
down in cash. Chancing to meet Alton
Granger on the street, to whom never
beforehad he mentioned the ten dollars
loaned him in '74, he reminded Alton
Granger of the little affair, and was promptly
paid. Also, of all unbelievable men to be
R O.
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130 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
in funds, he so found the town drunkard
for whom he had bought many a drink in
the old and palmy days. And from him
John Tarwater borrowed a dollar. Finally,
he took the afternoon train to San Francisco.
A dozen days later, carrying a half-
empty canvas sack of blankets and old
clothes, he landed on the beach of Dyea
in the thick of the great Klondike Rush.
The beach was screaming bedlam. Ten
thousand tons of outfit lay heaped and
scattered, and twice ten thousand men
struggled with it and clamoured about it.
Freight, by Indian-back, over Chilcoot to
Lake Linderman, had jumped from sixteen
to thirty cents a pound, which latter was
a rate of six hundred dollars a ton. And
the sub-arctic winter gloomed near at
hand. All knew it, and all knew that of
thetwenty
thousand of themvery
few
would get across the passes, leaving the
rest to winter and wait for the late spring
thaw.
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 131
Such the beach old John Tarwater
stepped upon ;and straight across the
beach and up the trail toward Chilcoot he
headed, cackling his ancient chant, a very
Grandfather Argus himself, with no outfit
worryin the
world,for he did not
possess
any outfit. That night he slept on the
flats, five miles above Dyea, at the head of
canoe navigation. Here the Dyea River
became a rushing mountain torrent, plung-
ing out of a dark canyon from the glaciers
that fed it far above.
And here, early next morning, he beheld
a little man weighing no more than a
hundred, staggering along a foot-log under
all of a hundred pounds of flour strapped
on his back. Also, he beheld the little man
stumble off the log and fall face-downward
in a quiet eddy where the water was two
feet
deepand
proceed quietlyto drown.
It was no desire of his to take death so
easily, but the flour on his back weighed
as much as he and would not let him up.
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132 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
Thank you, old man/' he said to
Tarwater, when the latter had dragged him
up into the air and ashore.
While he unlaced his shoes and ran the
water out, they had further talk. Next,
he fished out a ten-dollar gold-piece and
offered it to his rescuer.
[ Old Tarwater shook his head and shivered,
for the ice-water had wet him to his knees.
But I reckon I wouldn't object to
settin' down to a friendly meal with you.
Ain't had breakfast ?
the little man,
who was past forty and who had said his
name was Anson, queried with a glance
frankly curious. Nary bite/' John Tarwater answered.
Where's your outfit ? Ahead ?
Nary outfit.
Expect to buy your grub on the
Inside ?
Nary a dollar to buy it with, friend.
Which ain't so important as a warm bite
of breakfast right now/'
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 133
In Anson's camp, a quarter of a mile
on, Tarwater found a slender, red-whiskered
young man of thirty cursing over a fire of
wet willow wood. Introduced as Charles,
he transferred his scowl and wrath to
Tarwater, who, genially oblivious, devoted
himself to the fire, took advantage of the
chill morning breeze to create a draught
which the other had left stupidly blocked
by stones,and soon
developedless smoke
and more flame. The third member of
the party, Bill Wilson, or Big Bill as they
called him, came in with a hundred-and-
forty-pound pack ;and what Tarwater
esteemed to be a very rotten breakfast
was dished out by Charles. The mush was
half cooked and mostly burnt, the bacon
was charred carbon, and the coffee was
unspeakable.
Immediately the meal was wolfed down,
the three partners took their empty pack-
straps and headed down trail to where
the remainder of their outfit lay at the last
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134 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
camp a mile away. And old Tarwater
became busy. He washed the dishes, for-
aged dry wood, mended a broken pack-
strap, put an edge on the butcher-knife
and camp-axe, and repacked the picks and
shovels into a more carryable parcel.
What had impressed him during the
brief breakfast was the sort of awe in which
Anson and Big Bill stood of Charles. Once,
during the morning, while Anson took a
breathing spell after bringing in another
hundred-pound pack, Tarwater delicately
hinted his impression. You see, it's this way/' Anson said.
We've divided our leadership. We'vegot specialities. Now I'm a carpenter.
When we get to Lake Linderman, and the
trees are chopped and whipsawed into
planks, I'll boss the building of the boat.
Big Bill is a logger and miner. So he'll
boss getting out the logs and all mining
operations. Most of our outfit's ahead.
We went broke paying the Indians to pack
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 135
that much of it to the top of Chilcoot.
Our last partner is up there with it, moving
it along by himself down the other side.
His name's Liverpool, and he's a sailor.
So, when the boat's built, he's the boss of
the outfit to
navigatethe lakes and
rapidsto Klondike.
And Charles this Mr. Crayton what
might his speciality be ?'
Tarwater
asked.
He's the business man. When it
comes to business and organization he's
boss.
Hum, Tarwater pondered. Very
lucky to get such a bunch of specialities
into one outfit.
((More than luck/' Anson agreed,
It
was all accident, too. Each of us started
alone. We met on the steamer coming up
from San Francisco, and formed the party.
-Well, I got to be goin'. Charles is liable
to get kicking because I ain't packin' myshare. Just the same, you can't expect a
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136 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
hundred-pound man to pack as much as a
hundred-and-sixty-pounder/'
Stick around and cook us something
for dinner/' Charles, on his next load in
and noting the effects of the old man's
handiness,told
Tarwater.And Tarwater cooked a dinner that was
a dinner, washed the dishes, had real pork
and beans for supper, and bread baked in
a frying-pan that was so delectable that
the three partners nearly foundered them-
selves on it. Supper dishes washed, he
cut shavings and kindling for a quick and
certain breakfast fire, showed Anson a
trick with foot-gear that was invaluable to
any hiker, sang his Like Argus of the
Ancient Times, and told them of the
great emigration across the Plains in Forty-
nine.
My goodness,
the first cheerful and
hearty-like camp since we hit the beach/'
Big Bill remarked as he knocked out his
pipe and began pulling off his shoes for bed.
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 137
Kind of made things easy, boys, eh ?
'
Tarwater queried genially.
All nodded. Well, then, I got a pro-
position, boys. You can take it or leave
it, but just listen kindly to it. You're in
a hurry to get in before the freeze-up. Half
the time is wasted over the cooking by
one of you that he might be puttin' in
packin' outfit. If I do the cookin' for
you, you
alTll get on that much faster.
Also, the cookin' 11 be better, and that'll
make you pack better. And I can pack
quite a bit myself in between times, quite a
bit, yes, sir, quite a bit.
Big Bill and Anson were just beginning
to nod their heads in agreement, when
Charles stopped them.
What do you expect of us in return ?
'
he demanded of the old man.
Oh, I leave it up to the boys.
That ain't business, Charles repri-
manded sharply. You made the proposi-
tion. Now finish it.
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138 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
Well, it's this way
You expect us to feed you all winter,
eh ?
'
Charles interrupted.
No, siree, I don't. All I reckon is a
passage to Klondike in your boat would be
mighty square of you.
You haven't an ounce of grub, old
man. Youll starve to death when you
get there.
I've been feedin' some long time pretty
successful/' Old Tarwater replied, a whim-
sical light in his eyes. I'm seventy, and
ain't starved to death never yet.
Will you sign a paper to the effect that
youshift for
yourselfas soon as
you getto Dawson ?
the business one demanded.
Oh, sure, was the response.
Again Charles checked his two partners'
expressions of satisfaction with the arrange-
ment. One other thing, old man. We're a
party of four, and we all have a vote on
questions like this. Young Liverpool is
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 139
ahead with the main outfit. He's got a
say so, and he isn't here to say it.
What kind of a party might he be ?
Tarwater inquired. He's a rough-neck sailor, and he's got
a quick, bad temper.
Some turbulent, Anson contributed.
And the way he can cuss is simply
God-awful, Big Bill testified.
But he's square, Big Bill added.
Anson nodded heartily to this appraisal. Well, boys, Tarwater summed up,
I set out for Californy and I got there.
And I'm going to get to Klondike. Ain't
a thing can stop me, ain't a thing. I'm
going to get three hundred thousand outa
the ground, too. Ain't a thing can stop
me, ain't a thing, because I just naturally
need the money. I don't mind a bad
temper so long's the boy is square. I'll
take my chance, an' I'll work along with
you till we catch up with him. Then, if
he says no to the proposition, I reckon I'll
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140 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
lose. But somehow I just can't see 'm
sayin' no, because that'd mean too close up
to freeze- up and too late for me to find
another chance like this. And, as I'm
sure going to get to Klondike, it's just
plumb impossible for him to say no.
Old John Tarwater became a striking
figure on a trail unusually replete with
striking figures. With thousands of men,
each back-tripping half a ton of outfit,
retracing every mile of the trail twenty
times, all came to know him and to hail
him as Father Christmas. And, as he
worked, ever he raised his chant with his
age-falsetto voi:e. None of the three menhe had joined could complain about his
work. True, his joints were stiff he ad-
mitted to a trifle of rheumatism. He moved
slowly, and seemed to creak and crackle
when he moved ; but he kept on moving.
Last into the blankets at night, he was
first out in the morning, so that the other
three had hot coffee before their one
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 141
before-breakfast pack. And, between
breakfast and dinner and between dinner
and supper, he always managed to back-
trip for several packs himself. Sixty pounds
was the limit of his burden, however. He
could manage seventy-five, but he could
not keep it up. Once, he tried ninety, but
collapsed on the trail and was seriously
shaky for a couple of days afterward.
Work On a trail wherehard-working
men learned for the first time what work
was, no man worked harder in proportion
to his strength than Old Tarwater. Driven
desperately on by the near-thrust of winter,
and lured madly on by the dream of gold,
they worked to their last ounce of strength
and fell by the way. Others, when failure
made certain, blew out their brains. Some
went mad, and still others, under the irk
of the man-destroying strain, broke partner-
ships and dissolved life-time friendships
with fellows just as good as themselves and
just as strained and mad.
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142 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
Work Old Tarwater could shame them
all, despite his creaking and crackling and
the nasty hacking cough he had developed.
Early and late, on trail or in camp beside
the trail, he was ever in evidence, ever
busy at something, ever responsive to the
hail of Father Christmas/' Weary back-
trippers would rest their packs on a log or
rock alongside of where he rested his, and
would say:
Sing us that song of yourn,
dad, about Forty-Nine. And, when he
had wheezingly complied, they would arise
under their loads, remark that it was real
heartening, and hit the forward trail again.
If ever a man worked his passage and
earned it, Big Bill confided to his two
partners, that man's our old Skeezicks.
You bet, Anson confirmed. He's a
valuable addition to the party, and I, for
one, ain't at all disagreeable to the notion
of making him a regular partner'
None of that Charles Crayton cut
in. When we get to Dawson we're quit
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 143
of him that's the agreement. We'd only
have to bury him if we let him stay on
with us. Besides, there's going to be a
famine, and every ounce of grub 11 count.
Remember, we're feeding him out of our
own supply all the way in. And if we run
short in the pinch next year, you'll know
the reason. Steamboats can't get up grub
to Dawson till the middle of June, and
that's nine months away.Well, you put as much money and outfit
in as the rest of us, Big Bill conceded,
and you've a say according.
And I'm going to have my say,
Charles asserted with increasing irritability.
And it's lucky for you with your fool
sentiments that you've got somebody to
think ahead for you, else you'd all starve
to death. I tell you that famine's coming.
I've been studying the situation. Flour
will be two dollars a pound, or ten, and no
sellers. You mark my words.
Across the rubble-covered flats, up the
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144 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
dark canyon to Sheep Camp, past the over-
hanging and ever-threatening glaciers to
the Scales, and from the Scales up the steep
pitches of ice-scoured rock where packers
climbed with hands and feet, Old Tar-
water camp-cooked and packed and sang.
He blew across Chilcoot Pass, above timber-
line, in the first swirl of autumn snow.
Those below, without firewood, on the
bitter rim of Crater Lake, heard from the
driving obscurity above them a weird voice
chanting :
Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this modern Greece,
Turn-turn, turn-turn, turn, turn, turn-turn,
To shear the Golden Fleece.
And out of the snow flurries they saw
appear a tall, gaunt form, with whiskers
of flying white that blended with the storm,
bending under a sixty-pound pack of camp
dunnage. Father Christmas was the hail.
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 145
And then :
Three rousing cheers for
Father Christmas
Two miles beyond Crater Lake lay
Happy Camp so named because here was
found the uppermost fringe of the timber
line, where men might warm themselves
by fire again. Scarcely could it be called
timber, for it was a dwarf rock-spruce
that never raised its loftiest branches
higher than a foot above the moss, and
that twisted and grovelled like a pig-
vegetable under the moss. Here, on the
trail leading into Happy Camp, in the first
sunshine of half a dozen days, Old Tar-
water rested his pack against a huge
boulder and caught his breath. Around
this boulder the trail passed, laden men
toiling slowly forward and men with empty
pack-straps limping rapidlyback for fresh
loads. Twice Old Tarwater essayed to
rise and go on, and each time, warned by
his shakiness, sank back to recover more
strength. From around the boulder he
R.O.
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146 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
heard voices in greeting, recognized Charles
Crayton's voice, and realized that at last
they had met up with Young Liverpool.
Quickly, Charles plunged into business,
and Tarwater heard withgreat
distinctness
every word of Charles' unflattering des-
cription of him and of the proposition to
give him passage to Dawson. A dam fool proposition, was Liver-
pool's judgment, when Charles had con-
cluded. An old granddad of seventy
If he's on his last legs, why in hell did you
hook up with him ? If there's going to be
a famine, and it looks like it, we need every
ounce of grub for ourselves. We only out-
fitted for four, not five.
It's all right, Tarwater heard Charles
assuring the other. Don't get excited.
The old codger agreed to leave the final
decision to you when we caught up with
you. All you've got to do is put your foot
down and say no.
You mean it's up to me to turn the
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 147
old one down, after your encouraging him
and taking advantage of his work clear
from Dyea here ?'
It's a hard trail, Liverpool, and only
the men that are hard will get through/'Charles strove to palliate.
And I'm to do the dirty work ?
Liverpool complained, while Tarwater's
heart sank.
That's just about the size of it,
Charles said. You've got the deciding.
Then old Tarwater's heart uprose again
as the air was rent by a cyclone of pro-
fanity, from the midst of which crackled
sentences like :
Dirty skunks . . . See
you in hell first . . . My mind's made
up ... Hell's fire and corruption . . .
The old codger goes down the Yukon with
us,stack on
that, my hearty . . . Hard ?
You don't know what hard is unless I
show you ... I'll bust the whole outfit
to hell and gone if any of you try to side-
track him . . . Just try to side-track
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148 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
him, that's all, and you'll think the Day of
Judgment and all God's blastingness has
hit the camp in one chunk
''
Such was the invigoratingness of Liver-
pool's
flow of
speechthat,
quitewithout
consciousness of effort, the old man arose
easily under his load and strode on toward
Happy Camp.
From Happy Camp to Long Lake, from
Long Lake to Deep Lake, and from DeepLake up over the enormous hog-back and
down to Linderman, the man-killing race
against winter kept on. Men broke their
hearts and backs and wept beside the trail
in sheer exhaustion. But winter never
faltered. The fall gales blew, and amid
bitter soaking rains and ever-increasing
snow flurries, Tarwater and the party to
which he was attached piled the last of
their outfit on the beach.
There was no rest. Across the lake, a
mile above a roaring torrent, they located
a patch of spruce and built their saw-pit.
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 149
Here, by hand, with an inadequate whipsaw,
they sawed the spruce-trunks into lumber.
They worked night and day. Thrice, on
the night-shift, underneath in the saw-pit,
Old Tarwater fainted.
By dayhe cooked
as well, and, in the betweenwhiles, helped
Anson in the building of the boat beside
the torrent as the green planks came
down.
The days grew shorter. The wind shifted
into the north and blew unending gales.
In the mornings the weary men crawled
from their blankets and in their socks
thawed out their frozen shoes by the fire
Tarwater always had burning for them.
Ever arose the increasing tale of famine on
the Inside. The last grub steamboats up
from Bering Sea were stalled by low water
at the beginning of theYukon Flats hundreds
of miles north of Dawson. In fact, they
lay at the old Hudson Bay Company's
post at Fort Yukon inside the Arctic
Circle. Flour in Dawson was up to two
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150 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
dollars apound,
but no one would sell.
Bonanza and Eldorado Kings, with money
to burn, were leaving for the Outside
because they could buy no grub. Miners'
Committees were confiscating all grub and
putting the population on strict rations.
A man who held out an ounce of grub was
shot like a dog. A score had been so
executed already.
And, under a strain which had broken
so many younger men, Old Tarwater began
to break. His cough had become terrible,
and had not his exhausted comrades slept
like the dead, he would have kept them
awake nights. Also, he began to take
chills, so that he dressed up to go to bed.
When he had finished so dressing, not a
rag of garment remained in his clothes
bag. All he possessed was on his back
and swathed aroundhis
gaunt old form. Gee said Big Bill.
If he puts all
he's got on now, when it ain't lower than
twenty above, what 11 he do later on when
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 151
it goes down to fifty and sixty below ?
'
They lined the rough-made boat down
the mountain torrent, nearly losing it a
dozen times, and rowed across the south
end of Lake Linderman in the thick of a
fall blizzard. Next morning they planned
to load and start, squarely into the teeth
of the north, on their perilous traverse of
half a thousand miles of lakes and rapids
and box canyons. But before he went
to bed that night, Young Liverpool was
out over the camp. He returned to find
his whole party asleep. Rousing Tar-
water, he talked with him in low tones.
Listen, dad, he said.
You've got a
passage in our boat, and if ever a man
earned a passage you have. But you know
yourself you're pretty well along in years,
and your health right now ain't exciting.
If you go on with us youll croak surer'n
hell. Now wait till I finish, dad. The
price for a passage has jumped to five hun-
dred dollars. I've been throwing my feet
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152 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
and I've hustled a passenger. He's an
official of the Alaska Commercial and just
has to get in. He's bid up to six hundred
to go with me in our boat. Now the
passage is yours. You sell it to him,
pokethe six hundred into
your jeans,and
pull South for California while the goin's
good. You can be in Dyea in two days,
and in California in a week more. What
d'ye say ?
Tarwater coughed and shivered for a
space, ere he could get freedom of breath
for speech.
Son, he said, I just want to tell
you one thing. I drove my four yoke of
oxen across the Plains in Forty-nine and
lost nary a one. I drove them plumb to
Californy, and I freighted with them
afterward out of Sutter's Fort to American
Bar. Now I'm going to Klondike. Ain't
nothing can stop me, ain't nothing at all.
I'm going to ride that boat, with you at
the steering sweep, clean to Klondike, and
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 153
I'mgoing
to shake three hundred thousand
out of the moss-roots. That being so,
it's contrary to reason and common sense
for me to sell out my passage. But I
thank you kindly, son, I thank you kindly.
The young sailor shot out his hand
impulsively and gripped the old man's.
By God, dad he cried.
You're
sure going to go then. You're the real
stuff. He looked with undisguised con-
tempt across the sleepers to where Charles
Crayton snored in his red beard. They
don't seem to make your kind any more,
dad.
Into the north they fought their way,
although old-timers, coming out, shook
their heads and prophesied they would be
frozen in on the lakes. That the freeze-
up might come any day was patent, and
delays of safety were no longer considered.
For this reason, Liverpool decided to shoot
the rapid stream connecting Linderman to
Lake Bennett with the fully loaded boat.
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154 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
It was the custom to line the empty boats
down and to portage the cargoes across.
Even then, many empty boats had been
wrecked. But the time was past for such
precaution.11
Climb out, dad/' Liverpool commanded,as he prepared to swing from the bank and
enter the rapids.
Old Tarwater shook his white head.
I'm sticking to the outfit, he declared.
It's the only way to get through. You
see, son, I'm going to Klondike. If I
stick by the boat, then the boat just natur-
ally goes to Klondike, too. If I get out,
then most likely you'll lose the boat.
Well, there's no use in overloading,
Charles announced, springing abruptly out
on the bank as the boat cast off.
Next time you wait for my orders
'
Liverpool
shouted ashore as the current
gripped the boat. And there won't be
any more walking around rapids and losing
time waiting to pick you up
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 155
What took them ten minutes
byriver,
took Charles half an hour by land, and
while they waited for him at the head of
Lake Bennett they passed the time of day
with several dilapidated old-timers on their
way out. The famine news was graver
than ever. The North-west Mounted Po-
lice, stationed at the foot of Lake Marsh
where the gold-rushers entered Canadian
territory, were refusing to let a man past
who did not carry with him seven hundred
pounds of grub. In Dawson City a thousand
men, with dog-teams, were waiting the
freeze-up to come out over the ice. The
trading companies could not fill their
grub-contracts, and partners were cutting
the cards to see which should go and which
should stay and work the claims.
That settles it, Charles announced,
whenhe learned of the action of the
mountedpolice on the boundary.
Old Man, you
might as well start back now/' Climb aboard Liverpool com-
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156 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
manded. We're going to Klondike, and
old dad is going along/' <j
A shift of gale to the south gave them
a fair wind down Lake Bennett, before
which they ran under a huge sail made by
Liverpool. The heavy weight of outfit
gave such ballast that he cracked on as a
daring sailor should when moments counted.
A shift of four points into the south-west,
coming just at the right time as they
entered upon Caribou Crossing, drove themdown that connecting link to lakes Tagish
and Marsh. In stormy sunset and twi-
light they made the dangerous crossing of
Great Windy Arm, wherein they beheld
two other boat-loads of gold-rushers cap-
size and drown.
Charles was for beaching for the night,
but Liverpool held on, steering down Tagish
by the sound of the surf on the shoals and
by the occasional shore-fires that adver-
tised wrecked or timid argonauts. At
four in the morning, he aroused Charles.
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 157
Old Tarwater, shiveringly awake, heard
Liverpool order Crayton aft beside him at
the steering-sweep, and also heard the one-
sided conversation.
Just listen, friend Charles, and keep
your own mouth shut/' Liverpool began.
I want you to get one thing into your
head and keep it there : old dad's going
by the police. Understand ? He's going
by. When they examine our outfit, old
dad's got a fifth share in it, savvee ?
That'll put us all 'way under what we ought
to have, but we can bluff it through.
Now get this ,and get it hard : there ain't
goingto be
any fall-down onthis
bluff
If you think I'd give away on the old
codger Charles began indignantly.
You thought that, Liverpool checked
him, because I never mentioned any
such thing. Now get me and get mehard : I don't care what you've been
thinking. It's what you're going to think.
We'll make the police post some time this
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158 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
afternoon, and we've
got
to
get readyto
pull the bluff without a hitch, and a word
to the wise is plenty/'
If you think I've got it in my mind
Charles began again.
Look here/' Liverpool shut him off.
I don't know what's in your mind. I
don't want to know. I want you to know
what's in my mind. If there's any slip-
up, if old dad gets turned back by the
police, I'm going to pick out the first
quiet bit of landscape and take you ashore
on it. And then I'm going to beat you
up to the Queen's taste. Get me, and get
me hard. It ain't going to be any half-
way beating, but a real, two-legged, two-
fisted, he-man beating. I don't expect
I'll kill you, but I'll come damn near to
half-killing you.
But what can I do ? Charles almost
whimpered. Just one thing, was Liverpool's final
word. You just pray. You pray so
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 159
hard that old dad gets by the police that
he does get by. That's all. Go back to
your blankets/'
Before they gained Lake Le Barge, the
land was sheeted with snow that would
not melt for half a year. Nor could they
lay their boat at will against the bank,
for the rim-ice was already forming. In-
side the mouth of the river, just ere it
entered Lake Le Barge, they found a
hundred storm-bound boats of the argo-
nauts. Out of the north, across the full
sweep of the great lake, blew an unending
snow gale. Three mornings they put out
and fought it and the cresting seas it drovethat turned to ice as they fell in-board.
While the others broke their hearts at the
oars, Old Tarwater managed to keep up
just sufficient circulation to survive by
chopping ice and throwing it over-
board.
Each day for three days, beaten to
helplessness, they turned tail on the battle
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i6o ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
and ran back into the sheltering river.
By the fourth day, the hundred boats had
increased to three hundred, and the two
thousand argonauts on board knew that
the great gale heralded the freeze-up of
Le Barge. Beyond, the rapidrivers
wouldcontinue to run for days, but unless they
got beyond, and immediately, they were
doomed to be frozen in for six months to
come.
This day we go through/' Liverpool
announced. We turn back for nothing.
And those of us that dies at the oars will
live again and go on pulling/'
And they went through, winning half
the length of the lake by nightfall and
pulling on through all the night hours as
the wind went down, falling asleep at the
oars and being rapped awake by Liverpool,
toilingon
throughan
age-long nightmarewhile the stars came out and the surface
of the lake turned to the unruffledness of a
sheet of paper and froze skin-ice that
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 161
tinkled like broken glass as their oar-
blades shattered it.
As day broke clear and cold, they entered
the river, with behind them a sea of ice.
Liverpool examined his aged passenger
and found him helpless and almost gone.
When he rounded the boat to against the
rim-ice to build a fire and warm up Tar-
water inside and out, Charles protested
against such loss of time. This ain't business, so don't you come
horning in/' Liverpool informed him. I'm
running the boat trip. So you just climb
out and chop firewood, and plenty of it.
Ill take care of dad. You, Anson, makea fire on the bank. And you, Bill, set up
the Yukon stove in the boat. Old dad
ain't as young as the rest of us, and for
the rest of this voyage he's going to have
a fire on board to sit by.
All of which came to pass ;and the
boat, in the grip of the current, like a
river steamer with smoke rising from the
R.O. L
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162 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
twojoints
ofstove-pipe, grounded
on
shoals, hung up on split currents, and
charged rapids and canyons, as it drove
deeper into the Northland winter. The
Big and Little Salmon rivers were throwing
mush-ice into the main river as they
passed, and, below the riffles, anchor-ice
arose from the river bottom and coated
the surface with crystal scum. Night and
day the rim-ice grew, till, in quiet places,
it extended out a hundred yards from
shore. And Old Tarwater, with all his
clothes on, sat by the stove and kept the
fire going. Night and day, not daring to
stop for fear of the imminent freeze-up,
they dared to run, an increasing mushiness
of ice running with them.
What ho, old hearty ?
Liverpool
would call out at times.
Cheer O, Old Tarwater had learned
to respond. What can I ever do for you, son, in
payment ?
Tarwater, stoking the fire,
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 163
would sometimes ask Liverpool, beating
now one released hand and now the other
as he fought for circulation where he steered
in the freezing stern-sheets.
Just break out that regular song of
yours, old Forty-Niner, was the invariable
reply.
And Tarwater would lift his voice in
the cackling chant, as he lifted it at the
end, when the boat swung in through
driving cake-ice and moored to the Dawson
City bank, and all waterfront Dawson
pricked its ears to hear the triumphant
paean :
Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this modern Greece,
Turn-turn, turn-turn, turn, turn, turn-turn,
To shear the Golden Fleece.
Charles did it, but he did it so discreetly
that none of his party, least of all the
sailor, ever learned of it. He saw two
great open barges being filled up with men,
and, on inquiry, learned that these were
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164 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
grubless ones being rounded up and sent
down the Yukon by the Committee of
Safety. The barges were to be towed by
the last little steamboat in Dawson, and
the hope was that Fort Yukon, where lay
the stranded steamboats, would be gained
before the river froze. At any rate, no
matter what happened to them, Dawson
would be relieved of their grub-consuming
presence. So to the Committeeof
SafetyCharles went, privily to drop a flea in its
ear concerning Tarwater's grubless, money-
less, and aged condition. Tarwater was
one of the last gathered in, and when
Young Liverpool returned to the boat,
from the bank he saw the barges in a run
of cake-ice, disapppearing around the bend
below Moose-hide Mountain.
Running in cake-ice all the way, and
several times escaping jams in the Yukon
Flats, the barges made their hundreds of
miles of progress farther into the north
and froze up cheek by jowl with the grub-
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 165
fleet. Here, inside the Arctic Circle, Old
Tarwater settled down to pass the long
winter. Several hours' work a day, chop-
ping firewood for the steamboat companies,
sufficed to keep him in food. For the rest
of the time there was nothing to do buthibernate in his log cabin.
Warmth, rest, and plenty to eat, cured
his hacking cough and put him in as good
physical condition as was possible for
his advanced years. But, even before
Christmas, the lack of fresh vegetables
caused scurvy to break out, and disap-
pointed adventurer after disappointed ad-
venturer took to his bunk in abject sur-
render to this culminating misfortune.
Not so Tarwater. Even before the first
symptoms appeared on him, he was putting
into practice his one prescription, namely,
exercise.
Fromthe
junkof the old
tradingpost he resurrected a number of rusty
traps, and from one of the steamboat
captains he borrowed a rifle.
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 167
At the end of January came his disaster.
Some powerful animal that he decided was
a bob-cat, managing to get caught in one
of his smaller traps, dragged it away. A
heavy snow-fall put a stop midway to his
pursuit, losing the trail for him and losing
himself. There were but several hours of
daylight each day between the twenty
hours of intervening darkness, and his
efforts in the grey light and continually
falling snow succeeded only in losing himmore thoroughly. Fortunately, when win-
ter snow falls in the Northland the ther-
mometer invariably rises; so, instead of
the customary forty and fifty and even
sixty degrees below zero, the temperature
remained fifteen below. Also, he was
warmly clad and had a full matchbox.
Further to mitigate his predicament, on
the fifth day he killed a wounded moose
that weighed over half a ton. Making his
camp beside it on a spruce-bottom, he was
prepared to last out the winter, unless a
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168 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
searching party found him or his scurvy
grew worse.
But at the end of two weeks there had
been no sign of search, while his scurvy
had undeniably grown worse. Against his
fire, banked from outer cold by a shelter-
wall of spruce-boughs, he crouched long
hours in sleep and long hours in waking.
But the waking hours grew less, becoming
semi-waking or half-dreaming hours as
the process of hibernation worked their
way with him. Slowly the sparkle point
of consciousness and identity that was
John Tarwater sank, deeper and deeper,
into the profounds of his being that had
been compounded ere man was man, andwhile he was becoming man, when he,
first of all animals, regarded himself with
an introspective eye and laid the beginnings
of morality in foundations of nightmare
peopled by the monsters of his own ethic-
thwarted desires.
Like a man in fever, waking to intervals
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 169
ofconsciousness,
so Old Tarwaterawoke,
cooked his moose-meat, and fed the fire;
but more and more time he ^spent in his
torpor, unaware of what was day-dream
and what was sleep-dream in the content
of his unconsciousness. And here, in the
unforgetable crypts of man's unwritten
history, unthinkable and unrealizable, like
passages of nightmare or impossible ad-
ventures of lunacy, he encountered the
monsters created of man's first morality
that ever since have vexed him into the
spinning of fantasies to elude them or do
battle with them.
In short,
weighted byhis
seventy years,in the vast and silent loneliness of the
North, Old Tarwater, as in the delirium of
drug or anaesthetic, recovered, within him-
self, the infantile mind of the child-man
of the early world. It was in the dusk of
Death's fluttery wings that Tarwater thus
crouched, and, like his remote forebear,
the child-man, went to myth-making, and
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170 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
sun-heroizing, himself hero-maker and the
hero in quest of the immemorable treasure
difficult of attainment.
Either must he attain the treasure for
so ran the inexorable logic of the shadow-
land of the unconscious or else sink into
the all-devouring sea, the blackness eater
of the light that swallowed to extinction
the sun each night . . . the sun that
arose ever in rebirth next morning in the
east, and that had become to man man'sfirst symbol of immortality through rebirth.
All this, in the deeps of his unconsciousness
(the shadowy western land of descending
light), was the near dusk of Death down
into which he slowly ebbed.
But how to escape this monster of the
dark that from within him slowly swallowed
him ? Too deep-sunk was he to dream of
escape or feel the prod of desire to escape.
For him reality had ceased. Nor from
within the darkened chamber of himself
could reality recrudesce. His years were
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 171
too heavy upon him, the debility of disease
and the lethargy and torpor of the silence
and the cold were too profound. Only
from without could reality impact upon
him and reawake within him an awareness
of reality. Otherwise he would ooze down
through the shadow-realm of the uncon-
scious into the all-darkness of extinction.
But it came, the smash of reality from
without, crashing upon his ear drums in a
loud, explosive snort. For twenty days,
in a temperature that had never risen
above fifty below, no breath of wind had
blown movement, no slightest sound had
broken the silence. Like the smoker on
the opium couch refocusing his eyes from
the spacious walls of dream to the narrow
confines of the mean little room, so Old
Tarwater stared vague-eyed before him
across his dying fire, at a huge moose that
stared at him in startlement, dragging a
woundedleg, manifesting all signs of extreme
exhaustion; it, too, had been straying
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172 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
blindly in the shadow-land, and had wak-
ened to reality only just ere it stepped
into Tarwater's fire.
He feebly slipped the large fur mitten
lined with thickness of wool from his right
hand.
Upontrial he found the trigger
finger too numb for movement. Carefully,
slowly, through long minutes, he worked
the bare hand inside his blankets, up
under his fur parka, through the chest
openings of his shirts, and into the slightly
warm hollow of his left arm-pit. Long
minutes passed ere the finger could move,
when, with equal slowness of caution, he
gathered his rifle to his shoulder and drew
bead upon the great animal across the fire.
At the shot, of the two shadow-wanderers,
the one reeled downward to the dark and
the other reeled upward to the light, sway-
ing drunkenly on his scurvy-ravaged legs,
shivering with nervousness and cold, rub-
bing swimming eyes with shaking fingers,
and staring at the real world all about
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 173
him that had returned to him with such
sickening suddenness. He shook himself
together, and realized that for long, how
long he did not know, he had bedded
in the arms of Death. He spat, with
definite intention, heard the spittle crackle
in the frost, and judged it must be below
and far below sixty below. In truth,
that day at Fort Yukon, the spirit ther-
mometerregistered seventy-five degrees
below zero, which, since freezing-point is
thirty-two above, was equivalent to one
hundred and seven degrees of frost.
Slowly Tarwater's brain reasoned to
action. Here, in the vast alone, dwelt
Death. Here had come two wounded
moose. With the clearing of the sky after
the great cold came on, he had located his
bearings, and he knew that both wounded
moose had trailed to him from the east.
Therefore, in the east, were men whites
or Indians he could not tell, but at any
rate men who might stand by him in his
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174 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
need and help moor him to reality abovethe sea of dark.
He moved slowly, but he moved in
reality, girding himself with rifle, ammuni-
tion, matches, and a pack of twenty pounds
of moose-meat. Then, an Argus rejuven-
ated, albeit lame of both legs and tottery,
he turned his back on the perilous west
and limped into the sun-arising, re-birthing
east. . . .
Days later how many days later he
was never to know dreaming dreams and
seeing visions, cackling his old gold-chant
of Forty-Nine, like one drowning and
swimming feeblyto
keephis consciousness
above the engulfing dark, he came out upon
the snow-slope to a canyon and saw below
smoke rising and men who ceased from
work to gaze at him. He tottered down
the hill to them, still singing ; and whenhe ceased from lack of breath they called
him variously : Santa Claus, Old Christmas,
Whiskers, the Last of the Mohicans, and
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 175
Father Christmas. And when he stood
among them he stood very still, without
speech, while great tears welled out of his
eyes. He cried silently, a long time, till,
as if suddenly bethinking himself, he sat
down in the snow with much creaking and
crackling of his joints, and from this low
vantage point toppled sidewise and fainted
calmly and easily away.
In less than a week Old Tarwater wasup
and limping about the housework of the
cabin, cooking and dish-washing for the
five men of the creek. Genuine sour-
doughs (pioneers) they were, tough and
hard-bitten, who had been buried so deeply
inside the Circle that they did not know
there was a Klondike Strike. The news he
brought them was their first word of it.
They lived on an almost straight-meat
diet of moose, caribou, and smoked sal-
mon, eked out with wild berries and some-
what succulent wild roots they had stocked
up with in the summer. They had forgotten
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176 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
the taste ofcoffee,
made fire with aburning
glass, carried live fire-sticks with them
wherever they travelled, and in their pipes
smoked dry leaves that bit the tongue
and were pungent to the nostrils.
Three years before, they had prospected
from the head-reaches of the Koyokuk
northward and clear across to the mouth
of the Mackenzie on the Arctic Ocean.
Here, on the whaleships, they had beheld
their last white men and equipped them-
selves with the last white man's grub, con-
sisting principally of salt and smoking
tobacco. Striking south and west on the
long traverse to the junction of the Yukon
and Porcupine at Fort Yukon, they had
found gold on this creek and remained
over to work the ground.
They hailed the advent of Tarwater
with joy, never tired of listening to his
tales of Forty-Nine, and rechristened him
Old Hero. Also, with tea made from
spruce needles, with concoctions brewed
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 177
from the inner willow bark, and with sour
and bitter roots and bulbs from the ground,
they dosed his scurvy out of him, so that
he ceased limping and began to lay on
flesh over his
bony
framework. Further,
they saw no reason at all why he should
not gather a rich treasure of gold from the
ground. Don't know about all of three hundred
thousand/' they told him one morning,at breakfast, ere they departed to their
work, but how'd a hundred thousand do,
Old Hero ? That's what we figure a claim
is worth, the ground being badly spotted,
and weVe already staked your location
notices.
Well, boys/' Old Tarwater answered, and thanking you kindly, all I can say
is that a hundred thousand will do nicely,
and very nicely, for a starter. Of course,
I ain't goin' to stop till I get the full three
hundred thousand. That's what I come
into the country for.
R.O. M
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178 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
They laughedand
applaudedhis ambi-
tion and reckoned they'd have to hunt a
richer creek for him. And Old Hero
reckoned that as the spring came on and
he grew spryer, he'd have to get out and
do a little snooping around himself. For all anybody knows/' he said,
pointing to a hillside across the creek
bottom, the moss under the snow there
may be plumb rooted in nugget gold.
He said no more, but as the sun rose
higher and the days grew longer and warmer,
he gazed often across the creek at the defi-
nite bench-formation half way up the hill.
And, oneday,
when the thaw was in full
swing, he crossed the stream and climbed
to the bench. Exposed patches of ground
had already thawed an inch deep. On
one such patch he stopped, gathered a
bunch of moss in his big gnarled hands,
and ripped it out by the roots. The sun
smouldered on dully glistening yellow. He
shook the handful of moss, and coarse
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 179
nuggets, like gravel, fell to the ground.
It was the Golden Fleece ready for the
shearing.
Not entirely unremembered in Alaskan
annals is the summer stampede of 1898
from Fort Yukon to the bench diggings of
Tarwater Hill. And when Tarwater sold
his holdings to the Bowdie interests for a
sheer half-million and faced for California,
he rode a mule over a new-cut trail, with
convenient road houses along the way, clear
to the steamboat landing at Fort Yukon.
At the first meal on the ocean-going
steamship out of St. Michaels, a waiter,
greyish-haired, pain-ravaged of face, scurvy-
twisted of body, served him. Old Tarwater
was compelled to look him over twice in
order to make certain he was Charles
Crayton.
Got it bad, eh, son ? Tarwater queried. Just my luck/' the other complained,
after recognition and greeting. Only one
of the party that the scurvy attacked.
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 181
I could manage your business for
you
Charles began eagerly. No, siree, Tarwater declared emphati-
cally.
But there's always post-holes to
dig, and cordwood to
chop,
and the cli-
mate's fine. . . .
'
Tarwater arrived home a true prodigal
grandfather for whom the fatted calf was
killed and ready. But first, ere he sat
down at table, he must stroll out andaround. And sons and daughters of his
flesh and of the law needs must go with
him, fulsomely eating out of the gnarled
old hand that had half a million to disburse.
He led the way, and no opinion he slyly
uttered was preposterous or impossible
enough to draw dissent from his following.
Pausing by the ruined water wheel which
he had built from the standing timber, his
face beamed as he gazed across the stretches
of Tarwater Valley, and on and up the far
heights to the summit of Tarwater Moun-
tain now all his again.
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i82 ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
A thoughtcame to him that made him
avert his face and blow his nose in order
to hide the twinkle in his eyes. Still
attended by the entire family, he strolled
on to the dilapidated barn. He picked
up an age-weathered single-tree from the
ground. William/' he said.
Remember that
little conversation we had just before I
started to Klondike ? Sure, William, you
remember. You told me I was crazy.
And I said my fathered have walloped the
tar out of me with a single-tree if I'd spoke
to him that way.
Aw, but that was only foolin', William
temporized.
William was a grizzled man of forty-five,
and his wife and grown sons stood in the
group, curiously watching Grandfather Tar-
water take off his coat and handit
to Maryto hold.
William come here/' he commanded
imperatively.
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ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 183
No matter how reluctantly, William came.
Just a taste, William, son, of what
my father give me often enough/' Old
Tarwater crooned, as he laid on his son's
back and shoulders with the single-tree.
Observe, I ain't hitting you on the head.
My father had a gosh-wollickin' temper
and never drew the line at heads when
he went after tar. Don't jerk your elbows
back that way You're likely to get a
crack on one by accident. And just tell
me one thing, William, son : is there nary
notion in your head that I'm crazy ?'
No William yelped out in pain, as he
danced about. You ain't crazy, father
Of course you ain't crazy
'
You said it, Old Tarwater remarked
sententiously, tossing the single-tree aside
and starting to struggle into his coat.
Nowlet's all
goin
andeat.
THE END.
Glen Ellen, California,
September 14, 1916.
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THE PRINCESS
AFIREburned cheerfully in the jungle
camp, and beside the fire lolled
a cheerful-seeming though horrible-appear-
ing man. This was a hobo jungle, pitched
in a thin strip of woods that lay between a
railroad embankment and the bank of
a river. But no hobo was the man. So
deep-sunk was he in the social abyss that
a proper hobo^would not sit by the samefire with him. A gay-cat, who is an
ignorant new-comer on the Road/' might
sit with such as he, but only long enough
to learn better. Even low down bindle-
stiffs and stew-bums, after a once-over,
would have passed this man by. A genuine
hobo, a couple of punks, or a bunch of
tender-yeared road-kids might have gone185
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i86 THE PRINCESS
through his rags for any stray pennies
or nickels and kicked him out into the
darkness. Even an alki-stiff would have
reckoned himself immeasurably superior.
For this man was that hybrid of tramp-
land,an alki-stiff that has
degeneratedinto a stew-bum, with so little self-
respect that he will never boil-up, and
with so little pride that he will eat
out of a garbage can. He was truly
horrible-appearing. He might have been
sixty years of age ;he might have been
ninety. His garments might have been
discarded by a rag-picker. Beside him,
an unrolled bundle showed itself as con-
sisting of a ragged overcoat and con-
taining an empty and smoke-blackened
tomato can, an empty and battered con-
densed milk can, some dog-meat partly
wrapped in brown paper and evidently
begged from some butcher-shop, a carrot
that had been run over in the street by
a wagon-wheel, three greenish-cankered
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THE PRINCESS 187
and decayed potatoes, and a sugar-bun
with a mouthful bitten from it and rescued
from the gutter, as was made patent by
the gutter-filth that still encrusted it.
A prodigious growth of whiskers, greyish-
dirty and untrimmed for years, sprouted
from his face. This hirsute growth should
have been white, but the season was
summer and it had not been exposed to a
rain-shower for some time. What was
visible of the face looked as if at some
period it had stopped a hand-grenade.
The nose was so variously malformed in
its healed brokenness that there was no
bridge, while one nostril, the size of a
pea, opened downward, and the other,
the size of a robin's egg, tilted upward
to the sky. One eye, of normal size, dim-
brown and misty, bulged to the verge of
popping out, and as if from senility wept
copiously and continuously. The other
eye, scarcely larger than a squirrel's and as
uncannily bright, twisted up obliquely
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i88 THE PRINCESS
into the hairy scar of a bone-crushed
eyebrow. And he had but one arm.
Yet was he cheerful. On his face, in
mild degree, was depicted sensuous plea-
sure as he lethargically scratched his ribs
with his one hand. He pawed over his food-
scraps, debated, then drew a twelve-ounce
druggist bottle from his inside coat-pocket.
The bottle was full of a colourless liquid,
the contemplation of which made his
little eye burn brighter and quickened his
movements. Picking up the tomato can,
he arose, went down the short path to
the river, and returned with the can filled
with not-nice river water. In the condensed
milk can he mixed one part of water with
two parts of fluid from the bottle. This
colourless fluid was druggist's alcohol, and
as such is known in tramp-land as alki.
Slowfootsteps, coming
down the side
of the railroad embankment, alarmed him
ere he could drink. Placing the can care-
fully upon the ground between his legs,
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THE PRINCESS 189
he covered it with his hat and waited
anxiously whatever impended.
Out of the darkness emerged a man as
filthy ragged as he. The new-comer, who
might have been fifty, and might have
been sixty, was grotesquely fat. He bulged
everywhere. He was composed of bulges.
His bulbous nose was the size and shape
of a turnip. His eyelids bulged and his
blue eyes bulged in competition with them.
In many places the seams of his garments
had parted across the bulges of body.
His calves grew into his feet, for the
broken elastic sides of his Congress gaiters
were swelled full with the fat of him.One arm only he sported, from the shoulder
of which was suspended a small and tat-
tered bundle with the mud caked dry on
the outer covering from the last place
he had pitched his doss. He advanced
with tentative caution, made sure of the
harmlessness of the man beside the fire,
and joined him.
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igo THE PRINCESS
Hello, grandpa/' the new-comer greeted,
then paused to stare at the other's flaring,
sky-open nostril. Say, Whiskers, how'd
ye keep the night dew out of that nose
o' yourn ?'
Whiskers growled an incoherence deepin his throat and spat into the fire in token
that he was not pleased by the question. For the love of Mike/' the fat man
chuckled,
if you got caught out in a
rainstorm without an umbrella you'd sure
drown, wouldn't you ?'
Can it, Fatty, can it, Whiskers mut-
tered wearily. They ain't nothin' new
in that line of chatter. Even the bulls
hand it out to me.
But you can still drink, I hope
;
Fatty at the same time mollified and
invited, with his one hand deftly pulling
theslip-knots
that fastened his bundle.
From within the bundle he brought to
light a twelve-ounce bottle of alki. Foot-
steps coming down the embankment
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THE PRINCESS 191
alarmed him, and he hid the bottle under
his hat on the ground between his legs.
But the next comer proved to be not
merely one of their own ilk, but likewise
to have only one arm. So forbidding
of aspect was he that greetings consisted
of no more than grunts. Huge-boned,
tall, gaunt to cadaverousness, his face a
dirty death's head, he was as repellent a
nightmare
of old
age
as ever Doreimagined.
His toothless, thin-lipped mouth was a
cruel and bitter slash under a great curved
nose that almost met the chin and that
was like a buzzard's beak. His one hand,
lean and crooked, was a talon. The beady
grey eyes, unblinking and unwavering,
were bitter as death, as bleak as absolute
zero and as merciless. His presence was
a chill, and Whiskers and Fatty instinc-
tively drew together for protection against
the unguessed threat of him. Watching
his chance, privily, Whiskers snuggled a
chunk of rock several pounds in weight
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192 THE PRINCESS
close to his hand if need for action should
arise. Fatty duplicated the performance.
Then both sat licking their lips, guiltily
embarrassed, while the unblinking eyes
of the terrible one bored into them, now
into one, now into another, and then downat the rock-chunks of their preparedness.
Huh sneered the terrible one, with
such dreadfulness of menace as to cause
Whiskers and Fatty involuntarily to close
their hands down on their cave-man's
weapons. Huh the other repeated, reaching
his one talon into his side coat pocket
with swift defmiteness. A hell of a
chance you two cheap bums 'd have with
me.
The talon emerged, clutching ready for
action a six-pound iron quoit.
Weain't lookin' for
trouble, Slim/'
Fatty quavered. Who in hell are you to call me
'
Slim'
? came the snarling answer.
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THE PRINCESS 193
Me? I'm
just Fatty,an' seein' 's I
never seen you before
An' I suppose that's Whiskers, there,
with the gay an' festive lamp tan-
going into his eyebrow an' the God-
forgive-us nose joy-riding all over his
mug ?
It'll do, it'll do, Whiskers muttered
uncomfortably. One monica's as good
as another, I find, at my time of life.
And everybody hands it out to me anyway.
And I need an umbrella when it rains to
keep from getting drowned, an' all the
rest of it.
I ain't used to
companydon't like
it, Slim growled. So if you guys want
to stick around, mind your step, that's
all, mind your step.
He fished from his pocket a cigar stump,
self-evidently shot from the gutter, and
prepared to put it in his mouth to chew.
Then he changed his mind, glared at his
companions savagely, and unrolled his
R.O.
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194 THE PRINCESS
bundle. Appeared in his hand a druggist's
bottle of alki.
Well/' he snarled,
I suppose I gotta
give you cheap skates a drink when
I ain't got more'n enough for a good
petrification for myself.
Almost a softening flicker of light was
imminent in his withered face as he beheld
the others proudly lift their hats and
exhibit their own supplies.
Here's some water for the mixin's,
Whiskers said, proffering his tomato-can
of river slush.uStockyards just above,
he added apologetically. But they
say
Huh Slim snapped short, mixing
the drink. I've drunk worse'n stock-
yards in my time.
Yet when all was ready, cans of alki
in their solitary hands, the three things
that had once been men hesitated, as if of
old habit, and next betrayed shame as if
at self-exposure.
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THE PRINCESS 195
Whiskers was the first to brazen it.
I've sat in at many a finer drinking/' he
bragged. With the pewter, Slim sneered.
With the silver, Whiskers corrected.
Slim turned a scorching eye-interro-
gation on Fatty.
Fatty nodded.
Beneath the salt, said Slim.
Above it, came Fatty's correction.
I was born above it, and I've never
travelled second class. First or steerage,
but no intermediate in mine.
Yourself ?
Whiskers queried of
Slim. In broken glass to the Queen, God
bless her, Slim answered, solemnly, with-
out snarl or sneer.
*'
In the pantry ? Fatty insinuated.
Simultaneously Slim reached for his
quoit, and Whiskers and Fatty for their
rocks.
Now don't let's get feverish, Fatty
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196 THE PRINCESS
said, dropping his own weapon. We
aren't scum. We're gentlemen. Let's
drink like gentlemen.<(
Let it be a real drinking/' Whiskers
approved.
Let's get petrified, Slim agreed.' '
Many a distillery's flowed under the bridge
since we were gentlemen ;but let's forget
the long road we've travelled since, and
hit our doss in the good old fashion in which
every gentleman went to bed when wewere young.
My father done it did it, Fatty
concurred and corrected, as old recollec-
tions exploded long-sealed brain-cells of
connotation and correct usage.
The other two nodded a descent from
similar fathers, and elevated their tin
cans of alcohol.
By the time each had finished his own
bottle and from his rags fished forth a
second one, their brains were well-mellowed
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THE PRINCESS 197
and a-glow, although they had not got
around to telling their real names. But
their English had improved. They spoke
it correctly, while the argo of tramp-land
ceased from their lips.
It's my constitution/' Whiskers was
explaining. Very few men could go
through what I have and live to tell the
tale. And I never took any care of myself.
If what the moralists and the physiologists
say were true, I'd have been dead long
ago. And it's the same with you two.
Look at us, at our advanced years, carous-
ing as the young ones don't dare, sleeping
out in the open on the ground, never
sheltered from frost nor rain nor storm,
never afraid of pneumonia or rheumatism
that would put half the young ones on
their backs in hospital.
He broke off to mix another drink, and
Fatty took up the tale.
And we've had our fun, he boasted,
and speaking of sweethearts and all/'
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198 THE PRINCESS
he cribbed from Kipling,
'
We've roguedand we've ranged
' '
'
In our time/
Slim completed the
crib for him.
I should say so, I should say so/'
Fatty confirmed. And been loved by
princesses at least I have/'
Go on and tell us about it/' Whiskers
urged. The night's young, and why
shouldn't we remember back to the roofs
of kings ?
Nothing loth, Fatty cleared his throat
for the recital and cast about in his mind
for the best way to begin.
It must be known that I came of
goodfamily. Percival Delaney, let us say, yes,
let us say Percival Delaney, was not un-
known at Oxford once upon a time not
for scholarship, I am frank to admit;but
the gay young dogs of that day, if any be
yet alive, would remember him
My people came over with the Con-
queror, Whiskers interrupted, extending
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THE PRINCESS 199
his hand to Fatty's in acknowledgment
of the introduction.
What name ?
Fatty queried.
I
did not seem quite to catch it.
Delarouse, Chauncey Delarouse. The
name will serve as well as any.
Both completed the handshake and
glanced to Slim.
Oh, well, while we're about it . . .
Fatty urged. Bruce Cadogan Cavendish, Slim
growled morosely. Go on, Percival,
with your princesses and the roofs of
kings.
Oh, I was a rare young devil, Percival
obliged, after I played ducks and drakes
at home and sported out over the world.
And I was some figure of a man before I
lost my shape polo, steeple-chasing, box-
ing, wrestling, swimming. I won medals
at buckjumping in Australia, and I held
more than several swimming records from
the quarter of a mile up. Women turned
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200 THE PRINCESS
their heads to look when I wentby. The
women God bless them
And Fatty, alias Percival Delaney, a
grotesque of manhood, put his bulgy hand
to his puffed lips and kissed audibly into
the starry vault of the sky. And the Princess he resumed, with
another kiss to the stars. She was as
fine a figure of a woman as I was a man,
as high-spirited and courageous, as reck-
less and dare-devilish. Lord, Lord, in the
water she was a mermaid, a sea-goddess.
And when it came to blood, beside
her I was parvenu. Her royal line
traced back into the mists of
antiquity. She was not a daughter of a fair-skinned
folk. Tawny golden was she, with golden-
brown eyes, and her hair that fell to her
knees was blue-black and straight, with
just the curly tendrilly tendency that
gives to woman's hair its charm. Oh,
there were no kinks in it, any more than
were there kinks in the hair of her entire
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THE PRINCESS 201
genealogy. For she was Polynesian, glow-
ing, golden, lovely and lovable, royal
Polynesian/'
Again he paused to kiss his hand to
the
memoryof her, and Slim, alias Bruce
Cadogan Cavendish, took advantage to
interject :
Huh Maybe you didn't shine in
scholarship, but at least you gleaned a
vocabulary out of Oxford/' And in the South Seas garnered a
better vocabulary from the lexicon of Love/'
Percival was quick on the uptake.
It was the island of Talofa, he went
on, meaning love, the Isle of Love, and
it was her island. Her father, the king,
an old man, sat on his mats with paralysed
knees and drank squareface gin all day
and most of the night, out of grief, sheer
grief. She, my princess, was the only
issue, her brother having been lost in their
double canoe in a hurricane while coming
up from a voyage to Samoa. And among
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202 THE PRINCESS
the Polynesians the royal women haveequal right with the men to rule. In
fact, they trace their genealogies always
by the female line/'
To this both Chauncey Delarouse and
Bruce Cadogan Cavendish nodded prompt
affirmation.
Ah/' said Percival,
I perceive you
both know the South Seas, wherefore,
without undue expenditure of verbiage
on my part, I am assured that you will
appreciate the charm of my princess, the
Princess Tui-nui of Talofa, the Princess of
the Isle of Love.
He kissed his hand toher, sipped
from
his condensed milk can a man-size drink
of druggist's alcohol, and to her again
kissed her hand.
But she was coy, and ever she fluttered
near to me but never near enough. Whenmy arm went out to her to girdle her,
presto, she was not there. I knew, as
never before, nor since, the thousand
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THE PRINCESS 203
dear and delightful anguishes of love frus-
trated but ever resilient and beckoned
on by the very goddess of love.
Some vocabulary, Bruce Cadogan
Cavendish muttered in aside to Chauncey
Delarouse. But Percival Delaney was not
to be deterred. He kissed his pudgy hand
aloft into the night and held warmly on.
No fond agonies of rapture deferred
that were not lavished upon me by my dear
Princess, herself ever a luring delight of
promise flitting just beyond my reach.
Every sweet lover's inferno unguessed of
by Dante she led me through. Ah Those
swooning tropic nights, under our palm
trees, the distant surf a langourous mur-
mur as from some vast sea shell of mystery,
when she, my Princess, all but melted to
my yearning, and with her laughter, that
was as silver strings by buds and blossoms
smitten, all but made lunacy of my lover's
ardency.
It was by my wrestling with the
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204 THE PRINCESS
championsof Talofa that I first interested
her. It was by my prowess at swimming
that I awoke her. And it was by a certain
swimming deed that I won from her more
than coquettish smiles and shy timidities
of feigned retreat. We were squidding that day, out on
the reef you know how, undoubtedly,
diving down the face of the wall of the
reef, five fathoms, ten fathoms, any depth
within reason, and shoving our squid-
sticks into the likely holes and crannies
of the coral where squid might be lairing.
With the squid-stick, bluntly sharp at
both ends, perhaps a foot long, and held
crosswise in the hand, the trick was to
gouge any lazying squid until he closed his
tentacles around fist, stick and arm. Then
you had him, and came to the surface with
him, and hit him in the head which is
in the centre of him, and peeled him off
into the waiting canoe. . . . And to think
I used to do that
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THE PRINCESS 205
Percival Delaney paused a moment, a
glimmer of awe on his rotund face, as he
contemplated the mighty picture of his
youth. Why, I've pulled out a squid with
tentacles eight feet long, and done it
under fifty feet of water. I could stay
down four minutes. I've gone down, with
a coral-rock to sink me, in a hundred and
ten feet to clear a fouled anchor. And
I could back-dive with a once-over and go
in feet-first from eighty feet above the sur-
face
Quit it, delete it, cease it, Chauncey
Delarouse admonished testily.
Tell of
the Princess. That's what makes old blood
leap again. Almost can I see her. Was
she very wonderful ?
Percival Delaney kissed unutterable affir-
mation.
11
1 have said she was a mermaid. She
was. I know she swam thirty-six hours
before being rescued, after her schooner
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206 THE PRINCESS
was capsized in a double-squall. I have
seen her do ninety feet and bring up pearl
shell in each hand. She was wonderful. As
a woman she was ravishing, sublime. I
have said she was a sea-goddess. She was.
Oh,for a Phidias or a Praxiteles to have
made the wonder of her body immortal
And that day, out for squid on the
reef, I was almost sick for her. Mad I
know I was mad for her. We would step
over the side from the big canoe, andswim down, side by side, into the delicious
depths of cool and colour, and she would
look at me, as we swam, and with her eyes
tantalize me to further madness. And at
last, down, far down, I lost myself and
reached for her. She eluded me like the
mermaid she was, and I saw the laughter
on her face as she fled. She fled deeper,
and I knew I had her for I was between
her and the surface;
but in the muck
coral sand of the bottom she made a churn-
ing with her squid stick. It was the old
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THE PRINCESS 207
trick to escape a shark. Andshe
workedit on me, rolling the water so that I could
not see her. And when I came up, she
was there ahead of me, clinging to the
side of the canoe and laughing.
Almost I would not be denied. But
not for nothing was she a princess. She
rested her hand on my arm and compelled
me to listen. We should play a game, she
said, enter into a competition for which
should get the more squid, the biggest
squid, and the smallest squid. Since the
wagers were kisses, you can well imagine
I went down on the first next dive with
soul aflame.
I got no squid. Never again in all
my life have I dived for squid. Perhaps
we were five fathoms down and exploring
the face of the reefwall for lurking places
of our prey, when it happened. I hadfound a likely lair and just proved it empty,
when I felt or sensed the nearness of
something inimical. I turned. There it
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2o8 THE PRINCESS
was, alongside of me, and no mere fish-
shark. Fully a dozen feet in length, with
the unmistakable phosphorescent cat's eye
gleaming like a drowning star, I knew it for
what it was, a tiger shark.
Not ten feet to the right, probing a
coral fissure with her squid stick, was
the Princess, and the tiger shark was
heading directly for her. My totality of
thought was precipitated to conscious-
ness in a single all-embracing flash. Theman-eater must be deflected from her, and
what was I, except a mad lover who would
gladly fight and die, or more gladly fight
and live, for his beloved ? Remember,
she was the woman wonderful, and I was
aflame for her.
Knowing fully the peril of my act, I
thrust the blunt-sharp end of my squid-
stick into the side of the shark, much as
one would attract a passing acquaintance
with a thumb-nudge in the ribs. And
the man-eater turned on me. You know
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THE PRINCESS 209
the South Seas, and you know that the
tiger shark, like the bald-face grizzly of
Alaska, never gives trail. The combat,
fathoms deep under the sea, was on if
by combat may be named such a one-sided
struggle.
The Princess unaware, caught her squid
and rose to the surface. The man-eater
rushed me. I fended him off with both
hands on his nose above his thousand-
toothed open mouth, so that he backedme against the sharp coral. The scars
are there to this day. Whenever I tried
to rise, he rushed me, and I could not
remain down there indefinitely without
air. Whenever he rushed me, I fended him^off with my hands on his nose. And I
would have escaped unharmed, except
for the slip of my right hand. Into his
mouth it went to the elbow. His jaws
closed, just below the elbow. You know
how a shark's teeth are. Once in they
cannot be released. They must go throughR.O.
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THE PRINCESS
to complete the bite, but they cannot go
through heavy bone. So, from just below
the elbow he stripped the bone clean to
the articulation of the wrist-joint, where
his teeth met and my good right hand
became his for an appetizer. But while he was doing this, I drove
the thumb of my left hand, to the hilt,
into his eye-orifice and popped out his
eye. This did not stop him. The meat
had maddened him. He pursued the
gushing stump of my wrist. Half a dozen
times I fended with my intact arm. Then
he got the poor mangled arm again, closed
down, and stripped the meat off the bone
from the shoulder down to the elbow-joint,
where his teeth met and he was free of his
second mouthful of me. But, at the same
time, with my good arm, I thumbed out
hisremaining eye/'
Percival Delaney shrugged his shoulders,
ere he resumed.
From above, those in the canoe had
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THE PRINCESS 211
beheld the entire happening and were
loud in praise of my deed. To this day
they still sing the song of me, and tell the
tale of me. And the Princess/' His pause
was brief but significant. The Princess
married me. . . .
Oh, well-a-dayand lack-
a-day, the whirligig of time and fortune,
the topsyturviness of luck, the wooden shoe
going up and the polished heel descending,
a French gunboat, a conquered island-
kingdom of Oceania, to-day ruled over
by a peasant-born, unlettered, colonial
gendarme, and . . .
He completed the sentence and the tale
by burying his face in the down-tilted
mouth of the condensed milk can and by
gurgling the corrosive drink down his
throat in thirsty gulps.*
i
After anappropriate pause, Chauncey
Delarouse, otherwise Whiskers, took up
the tale.
Far be it from me to boast of no
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212 THE PRINCESS
matter whatplace
of birth I have des-
cended from to sit here by this fire with
such as ... as chance along. I may
say, however, that I, too, was once a con-
siderable figure of a man. I may add that
it was horses, plus parents too indulgent,
that exiled me out over the world. I
may still wonder to query :
'
Are Dover's
cliffs still white ?'
Huh Bruce Cadogan Cavendish
sneered. Next you'll be asking: 'How
fares the old Lord Warden ?'
And I took every liberty, and vainly,
with a constitution that was iron/' Whis-
kers hurried on. Here I am with my
three score and ten behind me, and back
on that long road have I buried many
a youngster that was as rare and devilish
as I, but who could not stand the pace.
I knew the worst too young. And nowI
know the worst too old. But there was a
time, alas all too short, when I knew the
best.
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THE PRINCESS 213
I, too, kiss my hand to the Princess
of my heart. She was truly a princess,
Polynesian, a thousand miles and more
away to the eastward and the south from
Delaney's Isle of Love. The natives of
all around that part of the South Seas
called it the Jolly Island. Their own
name, the name of the people who dwelt
thereon, translates delicately and justly
into'
The Island of Tranquil Laughter.'
On the chart you will find the erroneous
name given to it by the old navigators
to be Manatomana. The seafaring gentry
the round ocean around called it the Adam-
less Eden.And
the missionaries for a
time called it God's Witness so great
had been their success at converting the
inhabitants. As for me, it was, and ever
shall be, Paradise.
It was my Paradise, for it was there
my Princess lived. John Asibeli Tungi
was king. He was full-blooded native,
descended out of the oldest and highest
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214 THE PRINCESS
chief-stock that traced back to Manuawhich was the primeval sea home of the
race. Also was he known as John the
Apostate. He lived a long life and apos-
tasized frequently. First converted by the
Catholics, he threw down the idols, broke
the tabus, cleaned out the native priests,
executed a few of the recalcitrant ones,
and sent all his subjects to church.
Next he fell for the traders, who
developed in him a champagne thirst, and
he shipped off the Catholic priests to New
Zealand. The great majority of his sub-
jects always followed his lead, and, having
no religion at all, ensued the time of the
Great Licentiousness, when by all South
Seas missionaries his island, in sermons,
was spoken of as Babylon. But the traders ruined his digestion
with too much champagne, and after several
years he fell for the Gospel according
to the Methodists, sent his people to
church, and cleaned up the beach and
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THE PRINCESS 215
thetrading
crowd so
spick
andspan
that
he would not permit them to smoke a
pipe out of doors on Sunday, and fined
one of the chief traders one hundred gold
sovereigns for washing his schooner's decks
on the Sabbath morn. That was the time of the Blue Laws,
but perhaps it was too rigorous for King
John. Off he packed the Methodists, one
fine day, exiled several hundred of his
people to Samoa for sticking to Methodism,
and, of all things, invented a religion of
his own, with himself the figure-head of
worship. In this he was aided and abetted
by a renegade Fijian. This lasted five
years. Maybe he grew tired of being God,
or maybe it was because the Fijian de-
camped with the six thousand pounds
in the royal treasury ;but at any rate the
Second Reformed Wesleyans got him, andhis entire kingdom went Wesleyan. The
pioneer Wesleyan missionary he actually
made prime minister, and what he did to
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216 THE PRINCESS
the trading crowd was a caution.
Why,in the end, King John's kingdom was
blacklisted and boycotted by the traders
till the revenues diminished to zero, the
people went bankrupt, and King John
couldn't borrow a shilling from his most
powerful chief.
By this time he was getting old, and
philosophic, and tolerant, and spiritually
atavistic. He fired out the Second
Reformed Wesleyans, called back the
exiles from Samoa, invited in the
traders, held a general love-feast, took
the lid off, proclaimed religious liberty
and high tariff, and as for himself went
back to the worship of his ancestors, dug
up the idols, reinstated a few octogenarian
priests, and observed the tabus. All of
which was lovely for the traders, and
prosperity reigned.Of
course,most of
his subjects followed him back into the
heathen worship. Yet quite a sprinkling
of Catholics, Methodists and Wesleyans
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THE PRINCESS 217
remained true to their beliefs and
managedto maintain a few squalid, one-horse
churches. But King John didn't mind,
any more than did he the high times of
the traders along the beach. Everything
went, so long as the taxes were paid.
Even when his wife, Queen Mamare, elected
to become a Baptist, and invited in a
little, weazened, sweet-spirited, club-
footed Baptist missionary, King John did
not object. All he insisted on was that
these wandering religions should be self-
supporting and not feed a pennyworth's
out of the royal coffers.
And now the threads of my recital
draw together in the paragon of female
exquisiteness my Princess/'
Whiskers paused, placed carefully on
the ground his half-full condensed milk
can with which he had been absently
toying, and kissed the fingers of his one
hand audibly aloft.
She was the daughter of Queen
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218 THE PRINCESS
Mamare. She was the woman wonderful.
Unlike the Diana type of Polynesian, she
was almost ethereal. She was ethereal, sub-
limated by purity, as shy and modest as a
violet, as fragile-slender as alily,
and
her eyes, luminous and shrinking tender,
were as asphodels on the sward of heaven.
She was all flower, and fire, and dew.
Hers was the sweetness of the mountain
rose, the gentleness of the dove. And
she was all of good as well as all of beauty,
devout in her belief in her mother's wor-
ship, which was the worship introduced
by Ebenezer Naismith, the Baptist mis-
sionary. But make no mistake. She was
no mere sweet spirit ripe for the bosom
of Abraham. All of exquisite deliciousness
of woman was she. She was woman, all
woman, to the last sensitive, quivering
atom of her And I ? I was a wastrel of the beach.
The wildest was not so wild as I, the
keenest not so keen, of all that wild,
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THE PRINCESS 219
keen trading crowd. It was esteemed I
played the stiffest hand of poker. I was
the only living man, white, brown, or black,
who dared run the Kuni-kuni Passage
in the dark. And on a black night I
have done it under reefs in a gale of wind.
Well, anyway, I had a bad reputation on
a beach where there were no good repu-
tations. I was reckless, dangerous, stopped
at nothing in fight or frolic;
and the
trading captains used to bring boiler-
sheeted prodigies from the vilest holes
of the South Pacific to try and drink me
under the table. I remember one, a cal-
cined Scotchman from the
NewHebrides.
It was a great drinking. He died of it,
and we laded him aboard ship, pickled in a
cask of trade rum, and sent him back to
his own place. A sample, a fair sample,
of the antic tricks we cut up on the beach
of Manatomana. And of all unthinkable things, what did
I up and do, one day, but look upon the
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220 THE PRINCESS
Princess to find her
goodand to fall in love
with her. It was the real thing. I was
as mad as a March hare, and after that I
got only madder. I reformed. Think of
that Think of what a slip of a woman
can do to a busy, roving man
By the
Lord Harry, it's true. I reformed. I
went to church. Hear me I became
converted. I cleared my soul before God
and kept my hands I had two then off
the ribald crew of the beach when it
laughed at this, my latest antic, and
wanted to know what was my game.
I tell you I reformed, and gave myself
in passion and sincerity to a religious
experience that has made me tolerant
of all religion ever since. I discharged
my best captain for immorality. So did
I my cook, and a better never boiled water
in Manatomana. For the same reason I
discharged my chief clerk. And for the
first time in the history of trading myschooners to the westward carried Bibles
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THE PRINCESS 221
in their stock. I built a little anchorite
bungalow up town on a mango-lined street
squarely alongside the little house occupied
by Ebenezer Naismith. And I made him
my pal and comrade, and found him a
veritablehoney pot
of sweetnessesand
goodnesses. And he was a man, through
and through a man. And he died long
after like a man, which I would like to
tell you about, were the tale of it not so
deservedly long.
It was the Princess, more than the
missionary, who was responsible for my
expressing my faith in works, and especi-
ally in that crowning work, the New Church,
Our Church, the Queen-mother's church.
'
Our poor church/ she said to me,
one night after prayer-meeting. I had
been converted only a fortnight.'
It is
so small its
congregationcan never
grow.And the roof leaks. And King John,
my hard-hearted father, will not contribute
a penny. Yet he has a big balance in
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222 THE PRINCESS
the treasury. And Manatomana is not
poor. Much money is made and squan-
dered. I know. I hear the gossip of the
wild ways of the beach. Less than a
month ago you lost more in one night,
gambling
at cards, than the cost of the
up-keep of our poor church for a year.'
And I told her it was true, but that it
was before I had seen the light. (Td
had an infernal run of bad luck.) I told
her I had not tasted liquor since, nor
turned a card. I told her that the roof
would be repaired at once, by Christian
carpenters selected by her from the con-
gregation. But she was filled with the
thought of a great revival that Ebenezer
Naismith could preach she was a dear saint
and she spoke of a great church, saying :
'
You are rich. You have many
schooners, and traders in far islands, and
I have heard of a great contract you have
signed to recruit labour for the German
plantations of Upolu. They say, next to
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224 THE PRINCESS
'
But you do not understand money.
It takes money to have credit. So, with
the money I have, and the credit I have, I
will work to make more money and credit,
and the church shall be built/
Work I was a
surpriseto
myself.It is an amazement, the amount of time a
man finds on his hands after he's given up
carousing, and gambling, and all the time-
eating diversions of the beach. And I
didn't waste a second of all my new-
found time. Instead I worked it over-
time. I did the work of half a dozen
men. I became a driver. My captains
made faster runs than ever and earned
bigger bonuses, as did my supercargoes,
who saw to it that my schooners did not loaf
and dawdle along the way. And I saw
to it that my supercargoes did see to it.
And good
By
the Lord Harry I was
so good it hurt. My conscience got so
expansive and fine-strung it lamed me
across the shoulders to carry it around
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THE PRINCESS 225
with me. Why, I even went back over
my accounts and paid Sweitzer fifty quid
I'd jiggered him out of in a deal in Fiji three
years before. And I compounded the
interest as well.
Work
I planted sugar cane thefirst commercial planting on Manatomana.
I ran in cargoes of kinky-heads from
Malaita, which is in the Solomons, till I
had twelve hundred of the blackbirds
putting in cane. And I sent a schooner
clear to Hawaii to bring back a dismantled
sugar mill and a German who said he
knew the field-end of cane. And he did,
and he charged me three hundred dollars
screw a month, and I took hold of the
mill-end. I installed the mill myself, with
the help of several mechanics I brought
up from Queensland. Of course there was a rival. His
name was Motomoe. He was the very
highest chief blood next to King John's.
He was full native, a strapping, handsome
R.O.
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226 THE PRINCESS
man, with a glowering way of showing his
dislikes. He certainly glowered at me
when I began hanging around the palace.
He went back in my history and circulated
the blackest tales about me. The worst
of it
was that most of them were true.
He even made a voyage to Apia to find
things out as if he couldn't find a plenty
right there on the beach of Manatomana
And he sneered at my failing for religion,
and at my going to prayer-meeting, and,
most of all, at my sugar-planting. He
challenged me to fight, and I kept off of
him. He threatened me, and I learned
in the nick of time of his plan to have
me knocked on the head. You see, he
wanted the Princess just as much as I
did, and I wanted her more.
She used to play the piano. So did I,
once. But I never let her know after I'd
heard her play the first time. And she
thought her playing was wonderful, the
dear, fond girl You know the sort, the
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THE PRINCESS 227
mechanical one-two-three, tum-tum-tumschool-girl stuff. And now I'll tell you
something funnier. Her playing was won-
derful to me. The gates of heaven opened
to me when she played. I can see myself
now, worn out and dog-tired after the
long day, lying on the mats of the palace
veranda and gazing upon her at the piano,
myself in a perfect idiocy of bliss. Why,
this idea she had of her fine playing was
the one flaw in her deliciousness of per-
fection, and I loved her for it. It kind of
brought her within my human reach.
Why, when she played her one-two-three,
tum-tum-tum,I
wasin the
seventh heavenof bliss. My weariness fell from me. I
loved her, and my love for her was clean
as flame, clean as my love for God. And
do you know, into my fond lover's fancy
continually intruded the thought that Godin most ways must look like her.
-That's right, Bruce Cadogan Caven-
dish, sneer as you like. But I tell you
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228 THE PRINCESS
that's love that I've been describing.
That's all. It's love. It's the realest,
purest, finest thing that can happen to a
man. And I knDw what I'm talking about.
It happened to me.
Whiskers, his beady squirrel's eye glit-
tering from out his ruined eyebrow like a
live coal in a jungle ambush, broke off long
enough to down a sedative draught from
his condensed milk can and to mix another.
The cane, he resumed, wiping his
prodigious mat of face hair with the back
of his hand.
It matured in sixteen
months in that climate, and I was ready,
just ready and no more, withthe mill
for the grinding. Naturally, it did not all
mature at once, but I had planted in such
succession that I could grind for nine
months steadily, while more was being
planted and the ratoons were springing up.
I had my troubles the first several
days. If it wasn't one thing the matter
with the mill, it was another. On the
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THE PRINCESS 229
fourthday, Ferguson, my engineer,
had to
shut down several hours in order to remedy
his own troubles. I was bothered by
the feeder. After having the niggers (who
had been feeding the cane) pour cream of
lime on the rollers to keep everything
sweet, I sent them out to join the cane-
cutting squads. So I was all alone at
that end, just as Ferguson started up the
mill, just as I discovered what was the
matter with the feed-rollers, and just as
Motomoe strolled up. He stood there, nr Norfolk jacket,
pigskin puttees, and all the rest of the
fashionable get-up out of a bandbox,
sneering at me covered with filth and
grease to the eyebrows and looking like
a navvy. And, the rollers now white
from the lime, I'd just seen what was
wrong. The rollers were not in plumb.One side crushed the cane well, but the other
side was too open. I shoved my fingers
in on that side. The big, toothed cogs
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230 THE PRINCESS
on the rollers did not touch
my fingers.And yet, suddenly, they did. With the
grip of ten thousand devils, my finger-
tips were caught, drawn in, and pulped
to well, just pulp. And, like a stick
of cane, I had started on my way. There
was no stopping me. Ten thousand horses
could not have pulled me back. There
was nothing to stop me. Hand, arm,
shoulder, head, and chest, down to the
toes of me, I was doomed to feed through.
It did hurt. It hurt so much it did
not hurt me at all. Quite detached, almost
may I say, I looked on my hand being
ground up, knuckle by knuckle, joint by
joint, the back of the hand, the wrist, the
forearm, all in order slowly and inevitably
feeding in. O engineer hoist by thine own
petard O sugar-maker crushed by thine
own cane-crusher
Motomoe sprang forward involun-
tarily, and the sneer was chased from his
face by an expression of solicitude. Then
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THE PRINCESS 231
the beauty of the situation dawned on
him, and he chuckled and grinned. No, I
didn't expect anything of him. Hadn't he
tried to knock me on the head ? What
could he do anyway ? He didn't know
anything about engines.
I yelled at the top of my lungs to
Ferguson to shut off the engine, but the
roar of the machinery drowned my voice.
And there I stood, up to the elbow and
feeding right on in. Yes, it did hurt. Therewere some astonishing twinges when special
nerves were shredded and dragged out by the
roots. But I remember that I was sur-
prised at the time that it did not hurt worse.
Motomoe made a movement that
attracted my attention. At the same time
he growled out loud, as if he hated himself,'
I'm a fool/ What he had done was to
pick up a cane-knife you know the kind,
as big as a machete and as heavy. And I
was grateful to him in advance for putting
me out of my misery. There wasn't any
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232 THE PRINCESS
sense in slowly feeding in till my head was
crushed, and already my arm was pulped
half way from elbow to shoulder, and the
pulping was going right on. So I was
grateful, as I bent my head to the blow.
'
Get your head out of the way, you
idiot
'
he barked at me.
And then I understood and obeyed. I
was a big man, and he took two hacks to
do it;
but he hacked my arm off just
outside the shoulder and dragged me backand laid me down on the cane.
Yes, the sugar paid enormously ;
and I built for the Princess the church of
her saintly dream, and . . . she married me/'
He partly assuaged his thirst, and uttered
his final word.
Alackaday Shuttlecock and battle-
dore. And this at the end of it all, lined
with boilerplate that even alcohol will
not corrode and that only alcohol will
tickle. Yet have I lived, and I kiss myhand to the dear dust of my Princess long
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THE PRINCESS 233
asleep in the great mausoleum of King John
that looks across the Vale of Manona to
the alien flag that floats over the bungalow
of the British Government House. . . .
Fatty pledged him sympathetically, and
sympathetically drank out of his own small
can. Bruce Cadogan Cavendish glared
into the fire with implacable bitterness.
He was a man who preferred to drink by
himself. Across the thin lips that com-
posed the cruel slash of his mouth played
twitches of mockery that caught Fatty's
eye. And Fatty, making sure first that his
rock-chunk was within reach, challenged. Well, how about yourself, Bruce Cado-
gan Cavendish? It's your turn/'
The other lifted bleak eyes that bored
into Fatty's until he physically betrayed
uncomfortableness.
I've lived a hard life, Slim grated
harshly. What do I know about love pas-
sages ?'
No man of your build and make-up
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234 THE PRINCESS
could have escaped them/' Fatty wheedled.
And what of it ? Slim snarled.
It's
no reason for a gentleman to boast of amor-
ous triumphs.
Oh, go on, be a good fellow/' Fatty
urged.
The night's still young. We'vestill some drink left. Delarouse and I have
contributed our share. It isn't often that
three real ones like us get together for a
telling. Surely you've got at least one
adventure in love you aren't ashamed to
tell about
Bruce Cadogan Cavendish pulled forth
his iron quoit and seemed to debate whether
or not he should brain the other. He
sighed, and put back the quoit. Very well, if you will have it, he
surrendered with manifest reluctance.
Like you two, I have had a remarkable
constitution. Andright now, speaking
of
armour-plate lining, I could drink the
both of you down when you were at your
prime. Like you two, my beginnings were
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THE PRINCESS 235
far distant and different. That I am
marked with the hall-mark of gentlehood
there is no discussion . . . unless either of
you care to discuss the matter now . . .
His one hand slipped into his pocket
and clutched the quoit. Neither of his
auditors spoke nor betrayed any awareness
of his menace.
It occurred a thousand miles to the
westward of Manatomana, on the island of
Tagalag, he continued abruptly, with an
air of saturnine disappointment in that
there had been no discussion. But first
I must tell you of how I got to Tagalag.
For reasons I shall not mention, by paths
of descent I shall not describe, in the
crown of my manhood and the prime of
my devilishness in which Oxford renegades
and racing younger sons had nothing on
me, I found myself master and owner of
a schooner so well known that she shall
remain historically nameless. I was run-
ning blackbird labour from the west South
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236 THE PRINCESS
Pacific and the Coral Sea to the plantations
of Hawaii and the nitrate mines of Chili
It was you who cleaned out the entire
population of'
Fatty exploded, ere he
could check his speech.
The one hand of Bruce Cadogan Caven-dish flashed pocketward and flashed back
with the quoit balanced ripe for business.
Proceed, Fatty sighed. I ... I have
quite forgotten what I was going to say.
Beastly funny country over that way,
the narrator drawled with perfect casualness.
You've read this Sea Wolf stuff
You weren't the Sea Wolf, Whiskers
broke in with involuntary positiveness.
No, sir, was the snarling answer.
The Sea Wolfs dead, isn't he? And
I'm still alive, aren't I ?
Of course, of course, Whiskers conceded.
He suffocated head-first in the mud off a
wharf in Victoria a couple of years back.
As I was saying and I don't like
interruptions, Bruce Cadogan Cavendish
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THE PRINCESS 237
proceeded,
it's a beastly funny country
over that way. I was at Taki-Tiki, a low
island that politically belongs to the Solo-
mons, but that geologically doesn't at all,
for the Solomons are high islands. Ethno-
graphically it belongs to Polynesia, Melan-esia, and Micronesia, because all the breeds
of the South Pacific have gravitated to it
by canoe-drift and intricately, degener-
atively, and amazingly interbred. The
scum of the scrapings of the bottom of the
human pit, biologically speaking, resides
in Taka-Tiki. And I know the bottom
and whereof I speak.
It was a beastly funny time of it I
had, diving out shell, fishing beche-de-
mer, trading hoop-iron and hatchets for
copra and ivory-nuts, running niggers
and all the rest of it. Why, even in Fiji
the Lotu washaving
a hard time of it
and the chiefs still eating long-pig. To
the westward it was fierce funny little
black kinky-heads, man-eaters the last Jack
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238 THE PRINCESS
of them, and the jackpot fat and spilling
over with wealth
Jack-pots ? Fatty queried. At sight
of an irritable movement, he added :
You
see, I never got over to the West like
Delarouse andyou.
They're all head-hunters. Heads are
valuable, especially a white man's head.
They decorate the canoe-houses and devil-
devil houses with them. Each village runs
a jack-pot, and everybody antes. Who-ever brings in a white man's head takes
the pot. If there aren't openers for a
long time, the pot grows to tremendous
proportions. Beastly funny, isn't it ?
I know. Didn't a Holland mate die
on me of blackwater ? And didn't I win
a pot myself ? It was this way. We
were lying at Lango-lui at the time. I
never let on, andarranged
the affair with
Johnny, my boat-steerer. He was a kinky-
head himself from Port Moresby. He cut
the dead mate's head off and sneaked
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240 THE PRINCESS
I gave him a couple of the mate's old shirts.
And I fancy the mate's head is still there
decorating the canoe-house.
Not exactly Christian burial of a
Christian/' Whiskers observed.
But a lucrative
burial/'Slim retorted.
I had to feed the rest of the mate over-
side to the sharks for nothing. Think of
feeding an eight-hundred-dollar head along
with it. It would have been criminal
waste and stark lunacy. Well, anyway, it was all beastly funny,
over there to the westward. And, without
telling you the scrape I got into at Taki-
Tiki, except that I sailed away with two
hundred kinky-heads for Queensland labour,
and for my manner of collecting them had
two British ships of war combing the Pacific
for me, I changed my course and ran to
the westward thinking to dispose of the
lot to the Spanish plantations on Bangar. Typhoon season. We caught it. The
Merry Mist was my schooner's name, and
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THE PRINCESS $41
I hadthought
she wasstoutly
built until
she hit that typhoon. I never saw such
seas. They pounded that stout craft to
pieces, literally so. The sticks were jerked
out of her, deckhouses splintered to match-
wood, rails ripped off, and, after the worst
had passed, the covering boards began to
go. We just managed to repair what was
left of one boat and keep the schooner
afloat only till the sea went down barely
enough to get away. And we outfitted
that boat in a hurry. The carpenter and
I were the last, and we had to jump for
it as he went down. There were only
four of us
Lost all the niggers? Whiskers inquired.
Some of them swam for some time,
Slim replied. But I don't fancy they made
the land. We were ten days in doing it.
And we had a spanking breeze most of
the way. And what do you think we had
in the boat with us ? Cases of square-
face gin and cases of dynamite. Funny,R.O. Q
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242 THE PRINCESS
wasn't it ? Well, it got funnier later on.
Oh, there was a small beaker of water, a little
salt horse, and some salt-water-soaked sea
biscuit enough to keep us alive to Tagalag. Now Tagalag is the disappointingest
island I've ever beheld. It shows up outof the sea so as you can make its fall
twenty miles off. It is a volcano cone
thrust up out of deep sea, with a segment
of the crater wall broken out. This gives
sea entrance to the crater itself, and makes
a fine sheltered harbour. And that's all.
Nothing lives there. The outside and the
inside of the crater are too steep. At one
place, inside, is a patch of about a thousand
coconut palms. And that's all, as I said,
saving a few insects. No four-legged thing,
even a rat, inhabits the place. And it's
funny, most awful funny, with all those
coconuts, not even a coconut crab. The
only meat-food living was schools of mullet
in the harbour fattest, finest, biggest
mullet I ever laid eyes on.
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THE PRINCESS 243
And the four of us landed on the
little beach and set up housekeeping among
the coconuts with a larder full of dynamite
and square-face. Why don't you laugh ?
It's funny, I tell you. Try it some time.
Holland gin and straight coconut diet.
I've never been able to look a confec-
tioner's window in the face since. Now
I'm not strong on religion like Chauncey
Delarouse there, but I have some primitive
ideas; and my concept of hell is an illimit-
able coconut plantation, stocked with cases
of square-face and populated by ship-
wrecked mariners. Funny ? It must
make the devil scream.
You know, straight coconut is what
the agriculturists call an unbalanced ration.
It certainly unbalanced our digestions.
We got so that whenever hunger took an
extra bite at us, we took another drink of
gin. After a couple of weeks of it, Olaf, a
squarehead sailor, got an idea. It came
when he was full of gin, and we, being in
R.O.*
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244 THE PRINCESS
the samefix, just
watched him shove a
cap and short fuse into a stick of dynamite
and stroll down toward the boat.
It dawned on me that he was going
to shoot fish if there were any about;but
the sun was beastly hot, and I just reclined
there and hoped he'd have luck.
About half an hour after he disappeared,
we heard the explosion. But he didn't
come back. We waited till the cool of
sunset, and down on the beach found what
had become of him. The boat was there
all right, grounded by the prevailing breeze,
but there was no Olaf. He would never
have to eat coconut again. We went
back, shakier than ever, and cracked
another square-face. The next day the cook announced
that he would rather take his chance with
dynamite than continue tryingto exist
on coconut, and that, though he didn't
know anything about dynamite, he knew a
sight too much about coconut. So we bit
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THE PRINCESS 245
the detonator down for him, shoved in a fuse,
and picked him a good fire-stick, while he
jolted up with a couple more stiff ones of gin. It was the same programme as the
day before. After a while we heard the
explosion and at
twilight
went down to
the boat, from which we scraped enough of
the cook for a funeral.
The carpenter and I stuck it out two
days more, then we drew straws for it
and it was his turn. We parted withharsh words
;for he wanted to take a
square-face along to refresh himself by
the way, while I was set against running
any chance of wasting the gin. Besides,
he had more than he could carry then,
and he wobbled and staggered as he walked.
Same thing, only there was a whole
lot of him left for me to bury, because he'd
prepared only half a stick. I managed to
last it out till next day, when, after duly
fortifying myself, I got sufficient courage
to tackle the dynamite. I used only a
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246 THE PRINCESS
third of a stick you know, short fuse,
with the end split so as to hold the head of
a safety match. That's where I mended
my predecessors' methods. Not using the
match-head, they'd too-long fuses. There-
fore,when
they spotteda school of mullet
and lighted the fuse, they had to hold
the dynamite till the fuse burned short
before they threw it. If they threw it
too soon, it wouldn't go off the instant it
hit the water, while the splash of it would
frighten the mullet away. Funny stuff
dynamite. At any rate, I still maintain
mine was the safer method.
I picked up a school of mullet before
I'd been rowing five minutes. Fine big
fat ones they were, and I could smell them
over the fire. When I stood up, fire-stick
in one hand, dynamite stick in the other,
myknees were knocking together.
Maybeit was the gin, or the anxiousness, or the
weakness and the hunger, and maybe it was
the result of all of them, but at any rate I
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THE PRINCESS 247
was all of a shake. Twice I failed to touch
the fire-stick to the dynamite. Then I did,
heard the match-head splutter,and let her go.
Now I don't know what happened to
the others, but I know what I did. I got
turned about. Did you ever stem a straw-
berry and throw the strawberry away
and pop the stem into your mouth ?
That's what I did. I threw the fire-stick
into the water after the mullet and held
on to the dynamite. And my arm went
off with the stick when it went off. . . .
Slim investigated the tomato-can for
water to mix himself a drink, but found it
empty. He stood up. Heigh ho/' he yawned, and started
down the path to the river.
In several minutes he was back. He
mixed the due quantity of river slush with
the alcohol, took a long, solitary drink, and
stared with bitter moodiness into the fire.
Yes, but . . . Fatty suggested. What happened then ?
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248 THE PRINCESS
Oh, said Slim.
Then the princess
married me, of course/'
But you were the only person left,
and there wasn't any princess . . . Whis-
kers cried out abruptly, and then let his
voice trail away to embarrassed silence.
Slim stared unblinkingly into the fire.
Percival Delaney and Chauncey Delarouse
looked at each other. Quietly, in solemn
silence, each with his one arm aided the
one arm of the other in rolling and tying
his bundle. And in silence, bundles slung
on shoulders,they went away out of the circle
of firelight. Not until they reached the top
of the railroad embankment did they speak. No gentleman would have done it,
said Whiskers.
No gentleman would have done it,
Fatty agreed.
THE END
Glen Ellen, California,
September 26, 1916.
Printed in Great Britain fa Butler & Tanner, Promt and London*
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NOVELS BY VICTOR BRIDGES
THE MAN FROM NOWHERE.2s. net.
Daily Mail. A rattling good story, full of high adven-
ture, good spirits, buoyant health and humour.
Morning Post. Mr. Victor Bridges has written a
rattling good yarn, written it with a vigour and resource
that never desert him from the beginning to the end.
THE CRUISE OF THE SCANDAL.2s. net.
The Times. Mr. Bridges goes far. He has madeus shake our sides with his fan, and hold our breath from
sheer suspense.
THE LADY FROM LONG ACRE.6s. net.
The Times. Told with unfailing vivacity.
Daily Graphic. A spirited story, with a generous
supply of sparkling dialogue and lively incident.
Yorkshire Post. More exciting adventure, told with
morespirit
and humour it would be hard to find.
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The Times. A really capital sensational story.
Punch. He whizzes along at a magnificent speed.
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Dcdlu Chronicle : A story of sweetness and light.
A LONDON GIRL. Paper, Is. 6d. net.
The BISHOP OF LONDON, addressing a meeting at the Northampton Institute,
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I know from my own experience in rescue and preventive work that the story is
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to-day. The pitiful tale is not overdrawn ; it is all too true.
Dundee Advertiser :
Certain it is that the author of this pitiless tale is neither
ordinary nor inexperienced.*
Baby'
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She leaps from the
printed, page into lovely, merry life, and all through she exercises a spell over one*
CLOSED DOORS. Paper, Is. 6d. net.
Sheffield Telegraph :
He writes with a purpose. He conceals nothing ; his
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BrituhWeekly :
The work of a writer of unusual talent.
Walmmler Gazette :
It is a very strong and vivid story of an extremely painful
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The book compels admiration, and its sombre tone does
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Review of Reviews ;
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In style it suggests sometimes the Russian realisticnovelists ; in plan it is obviously inspired by Zola ; in spirit it has some of the
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FINDING A FAIRY. 3s. net.
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BY HARRY GRAHAMIllustrated by LEWIS BAUMER.
DEPORTMENTAL DITTIES. Fcap. 8vo. Fifth
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Doily Chronicle. All clever, generally flippant, invariably amusing.
CANNED CLASSICS. Fcap. 8vo. Second Edition.
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Evening Standard: One long delight.
THE BOLSTER BOOK : A Book for the Bedside.
Fifth Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Daily Graphic :
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RHYMES FOR RIPER YEARS. Illustrated by NORAH
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